


The Other Side

by AdventureAddict



Series: Songs of Another World [1]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist (Anime 2003), Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Adulthood, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Bodyswap, Demisexual Edward Elric, Edward Elric Has Panic Attacks, F/M, Internal Crossover, PTSD, Parallel Universes, Period-Typical Racism, Post-Canon, Post-Fullmetal Alchemist: Conqueror of Shamballa, Post-Promised Day, Spoilers, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-19
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:48:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 54,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28180428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AdventureAddict/pseuds/AdventureAddict
Summary: In the seven years since Edward Elric had last seen the Gate, he really felt he'd pulled his life together. He'd gotten married, had a couple of kids, and actually managed to settle down. But when his life is thrown into chaos, he finds himself suddenly waking up somewhere he's never seen before: 1927 Germany.In the four years since Edward Elric had last seen the Gate, he really felt he'd pulled his life together. He'd managed to get Al adjusted to this world, got an apartment, and even found himself a best friend in Noah. But when his life is thrown into chaos, he finds himself suddenly waking up somewhere familiar: Amestris.Except... this isn't his Amestris.(Also known as "BH Ed and 03 Ed switch bodies and cause chaos in the other's life.")
Relationships: Alphonse Elric & Edward Elric, Edward Elric/Noah, Edward Elric/Winry Rockbell, Mei Chan | May Chang/Alphonse Elric
Series: Songs of Another World [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2089266
Comments: 111
Kudos: 121





	1. Are You Happy, Alchemist?

It had been seven years since Edward Elric had seen the gate. And he couldn't be happier about it.

Seeing the gate meant nothing but bad things, after all. It meant everything was in danger, especially himself. Not having seen the gate in that long was his own personal triumph, a reminder that that life was behind him now and he'd never have to go back. He liked where he was now, and he had no reason to want to change it, so why would he ever see the gate, anyway?

Sure, not having alchemy had been... _rough_ to adjust to at first. There had been a time back when it had still felt like a loss where he had broken a plate and screamed when he had realized he couldn't fix it. But then Winry had come along and shown him why she loved doing what she did, how she knew how to take that plate and carefully glue the pieces back together and make it into something... new. Not broken, but not _unbroken_ , either.

That had been the moment when Ed had decided to ask her to marry him.

Of course, it hadn't been exactly the way it had played out because he was still a stupid eighteen-year-old who had never been given a chance to properly socialize with his peers. But they had still managed to get where they wanted to go, building this life together. Even though Ed always felt like he was going to die of embarrassment every time Winry told the story of his proposal to someone _else_ , he couldn't help but feel a warm spark in his chest at the way her eyes lit up when she told the story, how she would glance over at him and give him the biggest, most genuine smile.

 _See that happiness?_ He would say to himself. _I don't know how, but that's because of you, you dumbass. Somehow, she's that happy just because she loves you that much_.

Then there was Theodore and Azami. Somehow he was at least a little responsible for those two beautiful, intelligent little... miracles. He honestly didn't even understand how such great kids could somehow be related to him. But it was pretty obvious just at first glance that they were his kids, what with those same bright golden eyes. They were both bright and curious, but he had also seen them have moments where it was clear they had a strong sense of empathy and good morals. Somehow, _somehow_ , he had to actually be doing something right.

Honestly, life was pretty good. Which made it all the more annoying that Ed couldn't quite place the nagging feeling at the back of his mind. It was like some sort of itch that he couldn't quite scratch, because he wasn't even really sure what was itching in the first place. He tried his best to just ignore it. After all, maybe it was just another bit of trauma bubbling to the surface, or maybe it was because his birthday was coming up again, and something about that always set him on edge for whatever reason. Whatever it was, Ed knew that focusing on it would just turn his life into chaos again, and since that was the last thing he wanted, he decided not to give the feeling any heed. His subconscious could work it out on its own.

The day that changed everything had started like any other day. Ed was up before anyone else in the house, before even the sun, all so he could walk into town and arrive at the market right as the farmers were opening their stalls, the sun just barely beginning to peek over the horizon. Then it was back to the house with an armful of fresh groceries for the day, breakfast already cooking by the time he heard Teddy and Zaza beginning to stir.

Making breakfast had become one of Ed's favorite parts of the day, since sometimes it was the last quiet moment he would have until everyone was in bed. Besides, it reminded him of all the times he had stumbled into the kitchen as a kid and his mom slid him a plate of freshly scrambled eggs before he had even thought about breakfast.

After the entire house had eaten, the house always turned to chaos, and Ed found himself pulled from one thing to the next without a chance to even think. Win always had a quick check-in with him over breakfast over who was supposed to show up for an appointment that day. She would go off to the workshop and start working on whatever orders needed to be finished, while Ed would sit with the kids, answer the phone, check in anyone who showed up for an appointment, and ran extra supplies to Winry whenever she called.

Then he would make lunch, feed the kids, put them down for a nap, and then bring lunch to Winry in the workroom so she would actually remember to eat at some point. He would always bring his lunch along as well (there was no eating food for yourself around toddlers), and they would chat while Winry told him about what she had been working on.

Back when he had stuck in Central waiting for Al to recover enough to handle the trip home and Winry had been stuck in Rush Valley finishing her apprenticeship, they had talked on the phone every other day. One time Winry had started ranting to him about something she couldn't get right with her current project no matter how many times she'd tried to fix it.

"Well, why don't you explain it to me, then?" Ed had said with a shrug, even if she couldn't see it over the phone.

"What? But you don't know anything about automail!"

"Yeah, that's the point. Alchemists do it all the time when they're working out a theory. Explaining something forces your brain to think about something differently. You're way more likely to catch your mistakes."

So she had explained her design to him, even though Ed had only the slightest idea what she was talking about. And sure enough, partway through the conversation, she'd had a sudden flash of inspiration and had hurriedly said goodbye to Ed so she could go try it on her model. When it worked, she had come back swearing up and down by Ed's model. She'd been telling him about anything she was struggling with in her automail ever since then. It was one of Ed's favorite parts of the day, seeing her eyes light up as she showed off her newest design to him, explained how adding a curve here could reduce the weight by 30%, _thirty percent, Edward_ , that's significant!

But right as he was leaning over the blueprint, asking if adding a ball bearing there would reduce some of the wear and tear, of course they were suddenly interrupted from the conversation by the sudden giggling screams of a couple very awake children. They would always exchange that smile of _"What can you do?"_ before each grabbing their coffee and going back to work. Ed would go take the kids and dog for a walk while Winry would sit and wonder if maybe that ball bearing idea actually had some merit.

And then the second half of the day wouldn't be much different from the first. Make sure Teddy and Zaza don't get into trouble, tell Winry when her clients show up, make dinner, remind Winry that she has to put the automail down at some point, please, put the kids to bed, and then chat with Winry over another cup of coffee as he waited for his nightly phone call from Al.

But that night, Al's call happened to be half an hour late.

"Would you stop glancing at the phone like that?" Winry said with a sigh as she stood up and took his glass. "I'm sure Al is fine. He probably just forgot to call."

"Al calls me every night," Ed said with a sigh. "He wouldn't just _forget_ for no reason."

"I know," Winry said with a shake of her head, calling over her shoulder as she went into the kitchen. "Do you want a cup of coffee?"

"Sure," Ed grumbled, resting his chin on the palm of his hand. "I'm going to need something to stay up."

"You _can_ go to bed, you know. Al would know he was calling later than normal, he wouldn't blame you for going to bed."

"Well, yeah, but I can't sleep when I'm worri-"

He was cut off in the middle of the sentence by the ring of the phone. Ed lunged for the phone and shoved it against his ear before it even had a chance to ring a second time.

"Hello?"

"Hey, Brother-"

Ed let out a deep breath, pressing a hand against his chest. "Oh, Al! Thank goodness! I was-"

"Oh, I'm so sorry, I should have called sooner!"

"No, no, it's fine, I was just worried something had happened to you!"

"Oh, I'm so sorry, Brother, I didn't notice the time! I just got so distracted I didn't think-" Ed frowned as he heard soft laughter and clinking of glasses in the background. Was Al at some sort of party or something?

"I actually have something important to tell you," Al continued. Ed frowned a little and gripped the phone, wondering if maybe something really was wrong. After all, even if Al said everything was fine, he was still calling late. Maybe if it had been Ed calling that sort of forgetfulness would be normal, but if Al said he was going to call at a certain time, he didn't just lose track of time and "forget."

"Well, um," Al continued, and Ed swore he could practically see Al twisting his hands together just based on how nervous his voice sounded. "I actually proposed to Mei today."

"Oh." Ed frowned, his brain putting two and two together based on Al's disappointed tone. "Oh, Al, I'm so sorry."

"What? No, Brother, she said yes!"

Ed snorted and looked at the phone with a frown. "What? Then why do you sound so upset? That's great news, Al!"

"Do you want sugar?" Winry called from the kitchen. Ed grinned and put a hand over the phone.

"Yeah, thanks Win! Al and Mei got engaged!"

"Aw, that's cute!"

"Win says you're cute," Ed said, still grinning widely as he turned his attention back to the phone. "So when are you two moving out here, anyway?"

"See, that's what I wanted to talk to you about, Brother. Mei's a princess, so-"

"Oh, right!" Ed said with a laugh. "So does that mean you're going to be a prince now?"

"Not exactly, but-"

"Well, what are you going to be if not a prince?"

"Brother," Al snapped. "I'm trying to say that we're not going to move out to Resembool."

"Oh." Ed blinked as Winry shoved a hot cup of coffee in his free hand. "So, what, Mei's got to wrap up loose ends or something first?"

"No," Al sighed. "No, Brother. She's a princess. She's never going to be able to finish up wrapping loose ends here. We have to stay in Xing."

"Oh."

Ed blinked at the phone, a long moment of silence passing between them. He could still hear the muffled sound of clinking glasses and laughter in the background, and it suddenly made sense. Of course people would be celebrating when a princess got engaged.

"But... I would never see you," Ed finally said, his voice coming out almost as a whisper.

"Ling says that if you and Winry would like, you're welcome to move out to Xing. He says he would prepare room for you in the castle... Winry could continue her automail business. And we would technically be living in the same house again."

"But..." Ed frowned and took a sip of his coffee. "We'd... We'd have to give up everything. This has been Winry's home her entire life. Teddy and Zaza would be living in a new country with a new language. All of Winry's clients..."

"I know, Brother. I'm so sorry."

"Well, what's the other option?" Ed said, taking another sip of coffee.

"Um... both of us staying where we are, living in different countries, I guess. We'd probably get a chance to visit you a couple of times a year, and then if you could come out here we could see each other a couple more times probably."

Ed's fingers tightened on the mug handle. "I always thought we would be able to see each other more often after we both settled down, not less."

"Yeah, me too," Al said with a weak chuckle. There was a slight pause before he added, "I'm sorry, Brother."

"No, no," Ed said with a shake of his head. "You have nothing to apologize for, Al. You love her. You absolutely should marry the girl you love. I'm happy for you."

"You are?"

"Yeah, of course," Ed said, cracking a grin that didn't reach his eyes. He put his coffee down on the side table next to the phone, then reached up and gripped the fabric of his shirt. "I never said congratulations, huh? Congratulations, Al. This is a big step. I'm so happy for you."

"Thanks, Brother," Al said with a deep sigh of relief, and Ed could tell he had been nervous that Ed would get upset.

"Hey, I've got to talk with Winry about what we're going to do, but why don't you just go enjoy yourself? It sounds like there's quite the party going on for you two. We'll get to talk tomorrow."

"Are you sure? You're okay?"

"I'm fine," Ed said with a snort. "Don't worry about me. We'll talk more tomorrow. You should enjoy yourself. Give your fiancée a kiss."

"Alright," Al said with a laugh. "Love ya, Brother."

"Love you too," Ed said with a soft smile, listening to the cheer of the party as Al turned away from the phone right before the sound cut off with a soft click.

"You okay?" Winry said. Ed turned around to face her, trying to crack a grin at her as a silent tear fell down his cheek.

"Yeah, it's fine," he said, right as Winry sprang to her feet and rushed over to wrap him in a hug.

Ed had been sure Winry would absolutely put her foot down and say no to the idea of a move to Xing, but once he had explained the situation, she was actually more open to the idea than he was.

"I mean, I would have to find someone who would be willing to take over here," she said, pacing as she talked. "This is the only automail place around for several cities, so I would hate for people to suddenly have to travel that much more just for some maintenance, but as long as there was someone here... Well, I could help build automail from the ground up in Xing. Do you know how exciting that is?"

"Okay," Ed said, gripping the fabric over his shirt a little tighter. His cold cup of coffee still sat on the side table. "But what about the kids? They'd have to learn a whole new language."

"Sure," Winry said. "But that's also supposed to be good for kids. And besides, better to do it now when they'll just soak all that language up like a sponge. It'll just get harder for them the older they get."

Ed's grip tightened a little more. The room spun a little. "So you think we should do it? You think we should just pack up everything and move to an entirely new country?"

"I think it would be good for us," Winry said, sitting down and putting a hand on Ed's arm. "And I especially think it would be good for you and Al. You two need each other."

"But I finally just made peace with having a stable life," Ed said with a groan. "Now I have to let go of everything we've built here and just... pick up and start all over again?"

"I never thought I would see the day," Winry said with a small laugh and a shake of her head. "Do you mean to tell me that the wild Edward Elric, the Fullmetal Alchemist, actually _wants_ to stay in one place and is scared of a little adventure?"

"I'm not scared!" Ed snapped. It felt like the room was closing in on him. "I just... I just need some time to adjust. I just... need to process things. I need a walk."

"Okay," Winry said, patting his chest and giving him a kiss on his head. "I'm going to get ready for bed. Don't stay out too long, okay?"

"Okay," Ed said with a weak smile, giving her hand a squeeze.

"We'll figure it out," Winry said, giving his hand a squeeze back. "I love you, okay?"

"I love you too," Ed murmured, and then she was off to take her end of day shower while he put on his coat and boots.

Outside was brisk, but it didn't seem to help much. Ed still felt dizzy, and that painful ache in his chest hadn't managed to go away, so he decided to go where he always went when his heart was hurting: To go talk to his mom.

Ed didn't really like believing in superstition, though he still wasn't sure what to believe after everything he'd been through. He still wasn't sure whether the Gate was proof an afterlife absolutely did exist, or proof that it absolutely did not exist. And he knew that a body wasn't the only definition of a person, and that therefore a person's remains were essentially worthless, because it wasn't like the grave where his mom was buried was actually his mom. It just happened to hold something that had once been a part of her.

But still, Ed liked feeling like he was able to keep her up to date on what was happening in his and Al's lives. He still wasn't sure exactly what he believed, even all these years later, but he at least knew that talking to his mom had always been deeply comforting. No matter what was true of the afterlife, talking to his mom's grave was worth it just for how much it seemed to help him. No other techniques had ever been able to work quite as well.

But that time, Ed had been sitting silently in front of her for several minutes before he finally found the courage to speak.

"I guess Al's growing up," Ed finally said with a sigh. "He's going to be getting married. And... And I don't really know if there's going to be as much room for me in his new life."

Ed's heart clenched again, and he bit his lip, pressing his hand against his chest.

It was then that he realized that the dizziness wasn't getting better, it was actually getting worse. And when he focused, it felt like his vision was a little darker, like someone was slowly fading out all the lights in the world until it would be only darkness. Ed felt a bit of panic set in at the back of his mind. Shit. Hadn't Winry once said something about being careful with dizziness and chest pain because it might be a heart attack and not just anxiety? Wasn't there something he was supposed to do?

Ed struggled to his feet, intending to run back into town, at least somewhere a little less secluded. But instead of staying on his feet, he got hit with a wave of dizziness, falling down in the grass.

He only had a brief moment to laugh at the irony that his mother's grave might be the last thing he would see before the world faded to dark.

In the next moment, the world was suddenly bright again. Bright and empty. Ed could no longer feel the ache in his heart he had just been feeling, but he swore he could feel his stomach drop to his feet. That is, if he even had a stomach here. He had never thought he would see this place again. Or at least, he had hoped that would be the case.

But this time he hadn't done anything worth landing himself here. Unless...

Unless this really was the afterlife. Unless he really had a heart attack just a few minutes before and now he was... Ed's head spun wildly. But what about Winry? What about Teddy and Zaza? He couldn't just leave his kids when they were still toddlers. Even his own mother had been able to stick around longer than that, he couldn't leave them, not yet, not yet-!

"Truth!" Ed shouted, spinning in the white space and desperately looking for a sign of something, anything. Where was the actual Gate? or was that gone because he had sacrificed it? Oh god, would he had had a few years more if he hadn't done that transmutation where he sacrificed a few years of his life? He hadn't thought he would only live to be _twenty-three_ , goddammit! He had thought he had been shaving a couple of years off of something like sixty or seventy, not _twenty-three_. Was it just that he would have only lived about as long as his mom if he hadn't meddled?

"Truth please!" Ed screamed, his voice cracking on the words. "Any price you need, anything, please, I'll pay it! My kids don't deserve this! Please, I have to go back!"

In the end, it all boiled down to a single question, asked in that blank canvas of a space.

_Are you happy with how it all turned out, Alchemist?_

The answer was out of him without thought, before he'd even had a chance to know what he was saying.

_No!_

* * *

It had been four years since Edward Elric had seen the gate. And it was killing him inside a tiny bit.

The irony wasn't lost him. He could still remember a time in his life where he had honestly hoped he would never see the gate again. He had once associated it with everything wrong in his life. But now that damn gate was all that stood between him and home.

He couldn't even fully explain why he even wanted to go home in the first place. Theoretically, he had everything he had ever wanted. Al had his body back, and he even got to know Al was safe. Hell, they even got to be in the same world, which was honestly more than Ed had counted on. Sure, he didn't have his alchemy, or all the people he cared about aside from Al, or even his own language, but that seemed like a small price considering just how much he had gained. And besides, what use would he have for alchemy at this point, after he had pulled off the one impossible thing he had wanted his alchemy to accomplish?

But honestly, after seven years of mostly living without alchemy, it was still somehow driving Ed crazy. Perhaps it was made even worse by the fact that he'd actually had that one day where he'd had it all back, where life had felt... _normal_ again. Which was crazy, wasn't it? He had been in the middle of a terrible thing happening, worlds colliding and people dying, and yet he had somehow felt like everything was back to the way it was supposed to be. Was that just how his life was going to be from now on, always feeling out of place with the quiet, normal lives everyone else aspired to? Was he always going to be itching for more danger, for another chance to throw himself into the thick of another problem?

Al said Ed was an adrenaline junkie. Ed wanted to argue with him about it, but he couldn't help but think maybe Al was hitting at some truth. Sometimes Ed wondered if he even knew how to live a normal life anymore. Did he only want his alchemy back because he associated alchemy with all the adventures that seemed to come with it?

And Ed knew that logically, the better thing to do, the _safer_ thing to do would be to walk away from it all and just be happy here. It was the _mature_ thing to do, and goddammit, he was 23 years old now, it was about time he started actually thinking and making mature decisions instead of only ever doing what he wanted.

And yet, despite knowing all this, despite him fighting and _trying_ to be a goddamn adult, every night when he closed his eyes, he was back in Resembool. No matter how much he wasn't supposed to want it, it was still _home_ , dammit.

At least everything was a little easier to bear when he actually had Al at his side. He was still in an unfamiliar world speaking an unfamiliar language and interacting with people who seemed like they should be familiar but weren't, but at least Al was there to understand just how _weird_ all of this was. At least there was someone he could talk to about everything and not feel like they were judging him and thinking he was crazy. At least he knew Al was safe, okay, and _alive_. He felt like he could handle taking on anything as long as he knew Al was still okay.

Then there was Noah. He still wasn't sure exactly when it had happened, but somehow she had managed to become his best friend. Maybe it was because there were some things he felt like he could only talk to her about. For one, he didn't want to make Al worry or feel guilty just because he was homesick. And he definitely didn't want to put the idea in Al's head that they should try and figure out how to get home. And then there was also the times he had been hit hard with grief for Alfons. Al was sympathetic about it, of course, but it was also just... weird to grieve someone who had the same face as the person in front of you. And besides, Noah could actually sit and talk with Ed about memories she also had of Alfons. Something about that helped, so Ed had found himself turning to Noah more often than he would have thought a few years ago. And... She actually understood him. He had built his own little found family with her and Al, and it was actually... pretty comfortable. 

Honestly, life was pretty good. Which made it all the more annoying that Ed couldn't quite place the nagging feeling at the back of his mind. He had done everything he could think of to try and satisfy the feeling, but no matter what he did, he still felt homesick, still felt that weird aching feeling for the crackle of alchemy at his fingertips again. Was this just leftover grief from missing Alfons? Was there perhaps a part of him that still hadn't learned freaking _anything_ and was wishing for alchemy just so he could have a chance at saving Alfons somehow? Whatever it was, Ed knew that focusing on it would just turn his life into chaos again, and since that was the last thing he wanted, he decided not to give the feeling any heed. His subconscious could work it out on its own.

The day that changed everything had started like any other day. Ed was woken by Al nudging him awake and saying he should come get some breakfast before Al headed out to work. Al had somehow managed to land himself a job making automobiles, something that felt like a ridiculous expense to Ed. He wasn't sure how people could manage to think about things like buying a car when the country still felt like it was barely managing to limp along. It took everything Ed and Al had just to make sure they had enough to actually pay the rent every month. 

Of course, that was partially as hard as it was because Ed hadn't been able to get a job like Al had. As uncomfortable as it made Ed, Al had an easy identity to slip into. All they had to do was cover up Alfons' death just a little bit and voila, Al suddenly had a full citizenship. Ed had never been able to have quite the same opportunity, considering his double's death had been all over the newspaper before he'd gotten back to this world. So Ed had to keep doing work under the table with whatever employers were willing to not care about his paperwork. 

But unfortunately, those employers were getting harder and harder to find these days, and so Noah and him ended up out of work more often than not. So after breakfast was done and Al was off to work, he would grab his guitar and head out with Noah to wander around town trying to earn some tips. 

The money was getting harder and harder to earn with every passing week. There was all sorts of talk about how everything was better now that inflation had been mostly corrected, but Ed didn't buy it. He prided himself on having pretty sharp instincts after years of living on the road and something in his gut said that things weren't over yet, that there was something bad, really _bad_ bubbling just underneath the surface. He could hear it in the tones of some men at the bar when they talked about jobs and money. Ed still struggled to fully get a grasp of every angle of this world's politics, since he hadn't been raised here, but he knew enough to know there was something rotten lying in wait. And he was terrified of when it would finally break loose, when men would say these things openly with raised voices instead of in hushed tones with their buddies over a table of beer steins.

"Dammit," Ed mumbled, slinging the guitar over his shoulder and counting out the small handful of change. It wasn't nearly enough to even be the same as what Al would make for a day of work at the factory, let alone enough extra that he would feel justified in taking Noah out for a nice lunch as a treat. He sighed and shoved it in his pocket. 

"I'm hungry," Ed muttered, hoping Noah wouldn't hear. She linked her arm through his. 

"You know, I heard through the grapevine that the university is having a special guest speaker today," she said with a smirk. Ed turned to look over at her and flashed her a grin. Special guest speakers almost always meant special food being laid out in order to impress the guest speaker. It was a trick of theirs to slip in and get a nice afternoon of good food and maybe some sort of interesting lecture. They weren't technically students, but Ed knew too well how to slip in and pose as students without anyone asking questions. 

The free food was always a welcome relief, of course, but Ed had also learned to appreciate the random lectures. Sometimes they actually hit at something he was interested in, such as the two-hour lecture on the theory of relativity (that Noah had definitely fallen asleep halfway through), but there were also lectures that managed to surprise him. One time he had accidentally found himself in the middle of what was apparently an all-day event talking about everything a person could ever hope to know about trees. Ed had expected to hate that one, but it had actually been so interesting that it became a fond memory for him. He and Noah had walked out of the conference that day babbling excitedly about how cool trees were, which wasn't something Ed had expected of himself.

The speaker that day happened to be talking about love from a chemical, scientific standpoint rather than a purely emotional one. It was interesting, but it was still a lot of information Ed already knew, having extensively studied how human bodies worked back in the day. Instead, he found himself watching Noah through most of the talk instead, how she clasped her hands tightly together as she listened, her eyes wide. 

The small gesture made Ed smile a little, his mind flicking back to Rose and how she had clasped her hands the same way. Only Rose had been doing it in prayer, while Noah was doing it while listening to someone talk about science. Something about the irony of that stuck Ed funny, and he couldn't help but smile at her through the lecture.

Eventually though, Noah noticed his eyes on her and turned to look at him, raising an eyebrow in question. "What?" 

"Nothing," Ed whispered with a wave of his hand. "It's just... cute how much you enjoy learning." 

Noah gave him a smile like she thought he was being either ridiculous or amusing, or probably both at the same time. But she didn't comment on it, instead turning back to paying attention to the lecture. She scooted until her shoulder was pressed against Ed's, leaning her weight into him as they listened. 

"That was so interesting," Noah said as they filed out of the lecture hall with the other students. People pressed against them on both sides, and Ed fumbled for her hand, lacing his fingers through hers so they wouldn't get separated in the crowd. Ed caught one guy a little older than him shooting a glare at Noah and her dark skin, and Ed pulled her a little closer to him as she talked, shooting the guy a glare of his own. Noah hummed and rested her head against Ed's shoulder with a smile. He glanced over at the clock tower while they walked. 

"Al should be getting out soon," Ed murmured. "Think we should head back to the apartment?" 

"Sure, let's go home." 

They walked in silence for a little bit, Ed's guitar lightly bumping against his back with each step. After a minute of that, Noah paused in her steps, her fingers slightly squeezing against Ed's. He paused with her, frowning when he noticed she was looking at the ground with furrowed eyebrows. 

"Noah?"

There was a long moment of silence as Noah stared at the ground, Ed reaching out to put his other hand on her shoulder. 

And then she was suddenly a blur of movement, closing the distance between them and suddenly pressing her lips against his. Ed gasped against the contact, his automail hand squeezing her shoulder in his surprise. Before he could help it, his mind was flitting back to a golden ballroom, a girl in a fancy ball gown with pink hair begging him to dance with her, the moment where he realized that somehow he was going to have to let down this poor girl who had pinned so much importance on their relationship without him realizing it. _Shit, it was all happening again. Why did the same things keep happening to him no matter how far he ran?_

"Noah..." he said slowly when she pulled away from him. He was cut off by a finger being pressed against his lips. 

"I'm in love with you, Edward," Noah whispered, finally flicking her eyes up to meet his. Ed shut his mouth, trying to swallow the lump that was suddenly lodged in his throat. 

Ed felt the ground tilt a little underneath his feet, and he pulled his hand away from her shoulder to instead grip the fabric of his shirt, right over his heart. He couldn't bear to let go of her hand, though, and his mind swam with the possibilities. He had gotten familiar with touching her after years of being on the road together, but he still couldn't completely forget about how she had once seen into the deepest of his memories with a touch. She'd said it was more powerful when people were sleeping. Was it even more powerful when she was kissing someone? Had she been able to see everything he had been thinking about? All those painful memories he would rather forget and somehow even in a whole other world he could never completely run away. He was still stuck remembering these painful things, always wondering if Noah knew about them and was staying quiet to avoid upsetting him or if he had actually managed to hide his pain from her. Had she been seeing his memories about her double while she was kissing him? And if she had, what was she thinking about him now? 

"You shouldn't love me," Ed finally croaked. "I'm a walking disaster. All I do is cause destruction and chaos everywhere I go. Loving me is dangerous." 

" _Love_ is dangerous," Noah said softly. "And I'm willing to take the risk to be around you." 

"But-" Ed felt his heart squeeze again. "But I'm just going to keep being on the move. I don't even have any paperwork or anything. I-I won't even be able to get properly married." 

"Why would care about that?" Noah said with a scoff. "I don't have any of those things either." 

Ed stared at her for a minute, letting out a whimper as he opened and closed his mouth a couple of times. Noah bit her lip as she watched him struggle to come up with any words. But before either of them had a chance to say anything, they were suddenly interrupted by a cheerful voice. 

"Noah! Brother!" 

The two of them turned to see a cheerful Al trotting over to them with a wide grin on his face. Both of them gave him a weak smile back, not wanting to let him catch on to their tension. 

"Were you two heading home?" Al said, glancing between the two of them. 

"Y-Yeah," Ed said softly, reaching up to rub at the back of his neck.

"Oh, good! We can all go home together!" 

"Actually," Ed frowned and glanced at Noah out of the corner of his eye, biting his lip. "I was thinking I would make some potato pancakes tonight, but we're out of eggs. I'll meet you at home in a bit?" 

"Oh, awesome! I love potato pancakes!" Al said, digging in his pocket and pulling out some money that he then handed to Ed. Noah opened her mouth like she was going to say something, then sighed. 

"See you in a bit," she murmured. 

"Yeah, we'll see you at home," Al said, glancing between Noah and Ed, his smile just a shade or two dimmer. Ed mentally cursed. Al had definitely noticed there was something going on between him and Noah, and he was probably going to be grilling Noah for details until the minute Ed got back home. Which meant that Ed needed to be clear on exactly what he was going to tell Noah _and_ Al before he went home. 

"Yeah, see you soon," Ed murmured back, making eye contact with Noah and trying to give her a small smile. _I promise I'm not running away. I just need a minute to think._ She gave him a small smile back and nodded to Al before they turned in the direction of home. Ed took in a deep breath and turned in the opposite direction. 

He clutched at the fabric of his shirt as he walked, staring at the ground and lost in thought. He was half tempted to just sit down so he would have a moment of peace to think. He felt absolutely dizzy with this new information he was somehow going to have to process. Noah was in love with him. Whether he returned her feelings or not, having that out in the open meant everything was going to change now. Either she would leave with a broken heart and it would just be him and Al, or... Or what, he would return her feelings? And then what? They would settle down with a house in the country and have two kids and a dog? The thought made Ed's head hurt. Somehow even though it was the future he had always thought he would somehow end up at, it just... didn't feel right. Not yet. Not when there was still so much city to explore, so many new things to learn, so much adventure to still be had. So many loose ends to tie up. So many things he was scared to even talk about with Noah. He knew that she knew... Well, _something_ about his life. She knew something about Al for sure, and some other things about alchemy. 

Did she know about all the other details of his life though? Did she see things like how he had killed his own mother, not just once, but _twice_? Did she judge him for making that choice? And if she didn't know about it, would she judge him when she found out? Did she know about Winry? Did she know what Ed had been feeling and thinking during that brief reunion he'd had with Winry? Would she judge him if she knew how often he was thinking about someone other than her?

But at the same time... How would Ed ever be able to stop thinking about Winry? He'd never been able to wrap things up with her, at least not properly. He still didn't know where he and Winry stood, and he'd eventually had to just accept that he would probably never know. But would Noah be able to accept that too? Ed tried to suck in a deep breath. It felt like he couldn't get in enough air no matter what he did. 

He was interrupted from his thoughts by bumping into a golden blur. He was just looking up to apologize for not paying enough attention, but his words got stuck in his throat as soon as he saw her. 

Here he had been trying so desperately to find her, going from town to town, hoping that if Al's and his doubles had been around, then maybe, _maybe_ there was a chance she was somewhere. He had been doing double takes of every blond girl his age for six years now, and of course now, _now,_ at the most inconvenient possible time of his life was the time when he would find her. Because of course his string of terrible, absolutely ironic luck wouldn't stop just because he was in a different world. 

"Winry," Ed breathed, the automail hand on his shirt tightening until he heard his knuckles creak. She looked at him with wide blue eyes. 

"Ah! Entschuldigung!" 

She said something else after that, but Ed had no idea what she was saying as a loud ringing in his ears blocked out all the noise. He was just realizing that something had to be wrong when his vision turned black and he could feel himself fall to the ground. 

In the next moment, the world was suddenly bright again. Bright and empty. Ed could no longer feel the ache in his heart he had just been feeling, but he swore he could feel his stomach drop to his feet. That is, if he even had a stomach here. Here had been desperately wanting to see this place for so long, and now it came to him at a time when he was terrified what it meant.

Ed had already died three times before. He knew exactly what it felt like. And he didn't like what normally came with dying. Dying meant things had gone wrong somehow. It didn't necessarily mean everything was over, but it could mean he wouldn't see Al again. Ed let out a scream and sank to his knees, pulling at his hair. 

"No! I just got you back!" he screamed. It felt weird in this place, to be able to scream like that without it hurting his vocal chords, to know that tears that would normally be streaming down his face just didn't exist here. In his desperation, he could oddly remember Al shouting something similar at him once upon a time, and the tears turned into slightly manic laughter. 

No matter what they did, no matter how many times they gave up everything just to keep each other safe, somehow they always ended up back here. Somehow it always came back to this. Ed wasn't even sure exactly how he'd died, and yet he had somehow died _again_ , and he and Al were separated _again._

"Please," Ed whispered, his hands shaking as he held them up like some sort of offering. "Any price you need, anything, please, I'll pay it. I can't lose him again. I can't leave him alone again, not like this. Please, I have to go back. Please. _Please_." 

In the end, it all boiled down to a single question, asked in that blank canvas of a space.

_Are you happy with how it all turned out, Alchemist?_

The answer was out of him without thought, before he'd even had a chance to know what he was saying.

_No!_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let's call this a "Tumblr made me do it" fanfic. I saw a bunch of posts by ruinsofxerxes talking about a concept where BH Ed and 03 Ed keep having dreams of one another's lives, which of course, leads to chaos. Then this idea popped in my head and wouldn't leave me alone until I finished writing it. 
> 
> Anyway, I was hoping to get further with this first chapter than this, and I even had more than this written up, it's just... I was realizing that this was getting awfully long, and it would probably be better to just break here for now instead. So no actual body switch reaction quite yet. That will be in the next chapter though!
> 
> By the way, I headcanon Ed as demisexual, so that's just what we're going with for this story. I think it fits pretty well with him being able to marry Winry in one lifetime and then Noah in another.


	2. Do Like Me

When Ed opened his eyes again, he could smell the fresh rain as it hit his skin, mud pressed against his face. He frowned, trying to place why he would wake up on the ground. He groaned and rolled over slightly, reaching up with his right hand to wipe the mud off his face. 

And froze when he _felt_ his face scraping underneath his fingers. 

Ed was sitting up in an instant, holding his right arm out in front of him as if it were alien. But the leg-? Ed did a quick mental check and frowned. No, the leg was still automail, because he could feel the joint where flesh met metal. Ed stared at his hand, stretching the fingers apart and flexing them. It felt way too real to just be a dream. Not to mention, in his dreams, he either had his automail or he didn't. He'd never had a dream where he only had _one_ of his limbs be automail.

But if this wasn't a dream, then what could be happening? Ed frantically tried to figure out what was the last thing he could remember. He remembered getting up that morning and going out to busk with Noah— Ed swallowed thickly. Right, Noah. She'd kissed him and said she'd loved him, and then he'd tried to get away, and then— Ed closed his eyes and took in a deep breath. And then there was Winry's double. And then he'd panicked, and... What, died? The last thing he could remember was being at the Gate, so had he died of shock from seeing Winry or something? But he didn't seem to be dead now. Or at the gate. So what was going on? Ed sighed and dragged his eyes away from his hand to look around at where he was. Maybe there was something that could give him some sort of clue what was going on. 

The first thing his eyes locked on were the words "Trisha Elric" carved into the gravestone in front of him. Ed spluttered and scrambled to his feet, staring at the stone with wide eyes. 

"Ed?" a voice cut through the rain, and Ed felt like his blood had frozen in his veins. As if the grave in front of him wasn't enough evidence of where he was, he would have recognized that voice no matter how many years it had been since he'd last heard her. 

"Winry," he breathed.

"Ed? Edward! Where are you?" 

How did she even know he was here? Ed scrambled to try and brush some of the mud off his shirt, but all he really did was spread it around instead. He sighed and gave up on the effort. Oh well. He never seemed to be at his best whenever he was reuniting with people, anyway. 

"I'm over here, Winry!" he called through the rain. 

"Oh, thank goodness!" he heard her say, and then she was running through the rain and darkness, and before he had time to even completely brace himself, there she was, suddenly in front of him again after four years.

"Hey," he said, his voice only managing to come out in a whisper. Winry had one black umbrella clutched in her hand and held over her head, and another matching umbrella clutched in her other hand, which she gave to Ed.

"Why didn't you come home?" she said, waving her empty hand in exasperation as she talked. 

"I'm sorry, Winry, I-I-"

"First you went and left when you were still so upset about Al—" 

"I know, I know, I'm sorry—" 

"And then it started raining and I knew you hadn't taken your umbrella or anything—" 

"I'm sorry, I..." Ed paused, frowning as he processed her words. "Wait, what?"

"You were just out longer than I expected and-" Winry waved her hands again, her voice cracking a little. "And I just worry about you, okay, and— _Why_ are you covered in mud?" 

She sounded downright frantic, and honestly, Ed couldn't entirely blame her, but he still didn't have any idea what to do. He gave her a sheepish grin and a shrug. "Uh... I guess I fell down." 

" _Why_ did you fall down?!" 

"Uh... I don't entirely remember, I kind of blacked out, but—"

"You _what_?!" Winry screeched, and then the distance between them was suddenly gone, her poking and prodding at him like she always had. "Okay, we need to get you back to the house and out of the rain _now_." 

There were still so many questions Ed had, so many things to figure out. Like... What had Winry been doing for the past four years? Was Al still stuck in Germany? How exactly had Ed ended up back here again? Why did he have his _arm_ back, anyway? But even he had to admit that maybe the questions could wait five minutes so he could ask them inside the warm, dry house. He gave Winry a small smile. "Okay."

Winry leaned in and gave him a kiss on the cheek, making Ed freeze in place. Oh god. Hadn't he just dealt with this with Noah? And now it was all happening again, he was going to have to make Winry upset over him _again_ , nothing ever changed, nothing changed, ever—

But before he even had a chance to try and say anything, she was lacing her arm through his and leading him towards the house. Ed took a minute to breathe. Maybe it had just been one of those kisses that were friendly. Yeah, he was overthinking it. If Winry had really wanted to make a statement that she was in love with him, she would have kissed him on the lips, like Noah— 

Ed tried to swallow around the lump in his throat. _Noah_. What was he going to do about Noah? 

He shook his head like he could shake the thoughts right out of his brain. No, he had bigger things to focus on right now. First, he had to figure out how he'd gotten home in the first place, then he had to figure out where Al was. Had Al come with him? Or was he going to have to figure out some way to get Al back here too? And if he did... Was he going to figure out some way to get Noah here as well?

It was funny, in a way, because Ed could remember a time when Noah had tried so hard to convince him to bring her to his world, and he had absolutely refused. And now, the thought of leaving her behind in Germany... It hurt enough he was actually willing to consider trying to figure out a way to bring her here. What was even wrong with him? Was this just always going to be his fate, feeling torn between two worlds no matter what he did?

At least the Rockbell house looked the same as it always had, or at least, what he could see in the dark and the rain seemed like it was the same. He couldn't help but smile at the familiar sight. _Home._

As he was taking off his boots and wet coat in the entryway, Ed realized it wasn't just his arm that was different. Somehow, his clothes were similar to what he had been wearing but just different enough that now that Ed was looking at them in the light, he could tell it was a different set of clothes than what he had been wearing. What exactly had happened to make Ed show up back in this world but with an arm and new clothes? Ed frowned at the coat as he hung it up, but decided not to say anything about it, at least not yet. He could try and figure out answers in a minute, after he'd gotten a chance to catch his breath. 

"Oh my gosh, what are you doing up? It is _way_ past your bedtime, mister!" Ed blinked and looked up to see Winry scolding a blond boy who was peeking his head into the entryway. Ed blinked. Winry was talking like... Like a mom. 

Oh. _Oh._

"You were gone," the little boy said with a pout, and Winry sighed, crouching down so she was eye-level with him. 

"Were you worried about me and Daddy?" The little boy nodded with big, watery eyes. Ed decided not to mention to Winry that he'd noticed the kid's eyes were gold. He wasn't sure how Winry had managed to find some other guy in the country with golden eyes to have kids with, but he didn't really want to talk about it. He wasn't sure he liked the implications of her having gone and found a replacement him to marry after he'd left. 

"Well, everything is fine now, so you should say goodnight and get some sleep." 

"Can I have warm milk? Please?" 

"Okay. But then it's straight to bed." Winry sighed with a small smile, leaning over and kissing the boy's forehead. She glanced over at Ed, and her smile faded a little when her eyes connected with his, her eyebrows scrunching. "You okay, Ed? You look pale." 

"Uh, y-yeah," Ed stammered, doing his best to smile at her. He felt like he wasn't supposed to be here. Winry had managed to build herself a life while he'd been away, and here he was, in the middle of things, as usual. He needed to get out of here, get out of the way, let her get on with her life. How could he have been stupid enough to think he could just pick back up where he'd left off years ago? Of course he should go, he needed to get out of the way, let her get back to her life. Here she'd actually managed to get over everything and have a good life without him, and here he was just inserting himself into the picture again and disrupting everything. 

"I-I should..." he stammered. 

"You should go sit down," Winry said, standing up and looking him in the eyes. "I'll warm up the milk. Then we can talk." 

It was the kind of tone that Ed knew meant Winry wouldn't be willing to hear any arguments, so he nodded at her and went to sit in the dining room. The blond boy followed Winry into the kitchen, babbling at her about some dream he'd been having before he woke up and tried to find her. Ed sat at the table, pushing some papers out of the way so there would be some space in front of him.

But then the handwriting on one of the papers caught Ed's eye, and he slid it out of the pile in order to take a closer look. 

At first glance, it was just an ordinary shopping list, nothing really special about it. But it was a shopping list written in _his_ handwriting. Okay, so apparently Winry had missed him enough that she had decided to save even the most trivial of notes. Which was definitely _weird,_ but... Ed shook his head. No, something about that didn't add up. Even if Winry had decided to hold on to a shopping list from him for that many years... How had she gotten a hold of it? Why didn't it _look_ like a paper that was at least seven years old? Had he even written shopping lists back then? Ed wracked his brain for old memories. He had never really needed to get groceries, not when he had a healthy salary and was always on the run. He'd never even really had access to kitchens on the road, so he'd mostly relied on whatever the inn or local tavern had to offer for the day.

Then another item on the list caught Ed's eye: _Chalk for Teddy_. 

Chalk had definitely been a thing Ed had once been buying regularly. Even after he didn't need to draw circles, Al had needed a steady supply of chalk on hand, and most of the time it was easier to just buy it than try and transmute it from some limestone. But Teddy? Ed racked his brain, trying to think of who he could have ever known named Teddy. Maybe if he could place Teddy, he could figure out when he had written the list. He couldn't explain why, but something about the shopping list seemed... off to him.

"Okay, now be careful, it's hot," Winry said as she came into the dining room, the blond kid from before at her ankles. She set a mug on the table, and the kid scrambled into the chair, blowing hard enough on his glass of milk that Ed was sure there had to be spit involved. 

He was interrupted from his thoughts by the soft sound of a mug being place on the table in front of him. He glanced up, and Winry was giving him a soft smile. 

"I figured tea would be better than coffee at this time of night," she said.

"Thanks," Ed said, giving her a half-smile back and grabbing the mug. He had only barely smelled the bergamot and lavender before Winry was leaning over and kissing him on the forehead. Ed froze. Again with the friendly not-on-the-lips kisses. Had Winry just missed him that much? Oh god, would her husband be upset?

"I don't entirely know what's going on in your head," Winry said, sitting down in the chair next to him. "But I'll be here for you no matter what." 

"T-Thanks," Ed choked out. He was sure he was blushing with how hot his face felt, so he immediately took a sip of tea so he wouldn't have to say anything else. 

The silence was suddenly interrupted by the kid slamming his empty mug down on the table as if it were an eating competition. "All done!" 

"Okay then," Winry said with a laugh. "Straight to bed with you, mister!" 

Ed couldn't help but smile into his mug. Winry was so comfortable with being a mom, and her tone was so kind and sweet, it reminded him of his own mother.

"Can I say goodnight?" 

"Of course," Winry said, holding her arms out for a hug. The boy launched himself into them with a huge grin, wrapping his arms around Winry's neck and kissing her cheek. 

"Goodnight, mommy! I love you!" 

"I love you too!" Winry said, giving him five rapid kisses on his face, making him squirm and giggle. She then released him and ruffled his hair. "Goodnight, Teddy." 

Ed blinked, his mind swimming. Wait, but the _kid_ was Teddy? But he had never met the kid before in his life! How could there be a shopping list in _his_ handwriting that mentioned Teddy? The kid couldn't be any older than five at the most, which meant he had been in Germany for this kid's entire life, so there was no way- 

He was interrupted out of his thoughts by a couple of tiny hands barely managing to reach around his waist in a hug. Ed blinked and glanced down, noticing Teddy's face pressed against his vest. Ed reached out and patted the boy on the back a couple times. "Uh, goodnight." 

"It'll be okay," Teddy said, his voice having changed from bouncy to gentle. Ed almost felt like he would break in half. Somehow this kid knew he was upset and just wanted him to feel better, enough to even give him a hug. Ed wasn't sure whether he should be grinning or crying at how pure it was. 

"Thank you," Ed whispered, his half-hearted pats turning into a genuine hug. Teddy squeezed him back. 

"Night, Daddy, I love you!" 

Ed froze, but before he could even fully process what he'd just heard, Teddy was already bouncing and going off to bed. 

"Ed? Ed, are you okay?" 

Ed felt like Winry was miles away, his mind flicking back to that time he had been not in his own world, not in his own body, but somehow it still felt so familiar... the sirens, the panic, the zeppelin, the _fire..._ Oh god, it was all happening again, it was somehow happening again and he was powerless again, nothing ever changed, nothing—

"Ed? Edward!" 

A couple of hands cupped his face and Ed could vaguely process that it was Winry who was probably holding him, but he couldn't see her, all he could see was fire and rubble and screaming metal bits, and his breath was coming in short gasps because wasn't there smoke in the air and metal on top of him?

"It's okay," Winry said softly, and a thumb brushed against his cheek. "It's okay, it's okay. Just breathe. Please breathe, Ed." 

Winry hadn't been there, this couldn't be what was happening. Ed felt like his mind snapped back to the present, but somehow he still felt just as terrified as if there were still fire all around him. He looked at Winry with wild eyes.

"This is wrong," Ed whispered. "This is all wrong. I'm not supposed to be here. You're not... _mine_." 

"What?" Winry frowned. 

He couldn't handle telling her that he wasn't her Ed, that he wasn't supposed to have this life where they were married and had kids and... And an arm. Ed groaned and nearly smacked his head on the table. The arm, of course! How had he not realized this the instant he'd noticed that damn arm? Of course this wasn't his world, wasn't even his body. He'd just been so _desperate_ , so _willing_ to believe he was finally home after he had spent so long wishing and hoping for it. He couldn't bear to tell that all to Winry, to watch her face fall and crumble when she realized he wasn't her husband, wasn't the Ed she loved. Oh god, where was her Ed, anyway? Where did he go? Was he dead? Was she a widow married to someone who had taken over her dead husband's body? He couldn't do that to her. There was no way he could tell her.

And then it hit him. This world was so similar to his, so close that he had mistaken it for his. So there had to be an Al here, probably an Al who was actually his brother. If they had been through the same sort of adventures, then Al would have seen enough weird things to understand if Ed went to him saying he was a different Ed who had traded bodies. 

Then again... Ed grabbed his right arm. The last time he'd had a flesh arm like this was only because Al had sacrificed himself for Ed. What if Al wasn't alive in this world? What if all their adventures meant—

No. No, that wouldn't be the way it happened. There was no way Ed would be content to just settle down and have a family after something like that happening to Al. The other Ed would have found something to help Al, something to fix it, just like he had done when he once woke up with a whole body. Even if they were from two different worlds, they were both Eds. And Ed had to believe that they would both make at least similar decisions. Al had to be here. He had to. 

"I need to talk to Al," Ed whispered. Winry gave him a weak smile and patted his leg. 

"I know. He'll be calling tomorrow at the usual time."

Tomorrow? Ed's heart clenched. He wouldn't be able to talk to Al? Well, it was the middle of the night, actually. But still, how far away was Al if he was calling every night at the same time? How was Ed going to ride this out and pretend he came from this world if he couldn't talk about it with anyone until tomorrow? He swallowed thickly and closed his eyes. 

"Hey, Ed?" Winry's voice interrupted his minor freak out, and he opened his eyes again. "Can you tell me more about how you blacked out? What happened?"

Oh, right, he'd told her he blacked out. Had the Ed in this world even blacked out? Well, maybe, he was on the ground, after all. And wherever the guy was now, he wasn't here, which Ed supposed counted as a sort of blackout. But what was Ed supposed to tell her had happened when he hadn't even been here when it had happened? Maybe he could just tell her what had happened to him. Hell, maybe she would have a better idea than him what had happened in the first place. 

"Uh, I guess I got kind of stressed out," Ed said, hoping that was vague enough for her. Winry nodded, so he figured it seemed believable enough. His mind flicked back to where he had woken up. "And, uh, I guess I went to visit mom to think, and then, uh... Well, my chest hurt, and then I got kind of dizzy and my vision got a little dark. Then my ears were ringing, and... Well, then I woke up in the cemetery." 

Okay, it was skipping the detour he'd taken at the Gate in the middle of that, but it was basically the truth. Not like Winry would even know what the Gate was anyway. 

"Oh my god, Ed!" Winry said, her hands flying to her mouth. "That sounds like you had a heart attack!" 

Ed almost wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it. After everything he'd been through, after he had somehow managed to even survive getting _stabbed in the chest_ , somehow what had ultimately done him in had been a stupid, unnoticed heart attack? He struggled to keep his face neutral. He didn't know everything this Winry had been through, but he knew that pretty much no one would respond well to someone laughing like a lunatic at finding out they'd had a heart attack. 

"Oh," Ed said, pressing his lips together. "I take it that's... not normal."

"No!" Winry said, slightly shaking his arms where she held him. "No, that is not normal, Edward Elric, not unless you've been hiding something from me!" 

"I don't think I have- I mean! Not _that! I mean-_ " 

"I swear..." Winry sighed and massaged her forehead. "Okay. You're taking tomorrow off, mister. Bed rest for you. I'll call the VA and make an appointment so we can get you properly checked out. But until then, no more random trips in the middle of the night, okay?"

"Okay," Ed said, slightly sinking in his seat. He almost wanted to protest, to tell her that maybe _this_ body hadn't had a heart attack, but that meant telling her everything, and he didn't want to deal with that. Better to just take the bed rest orders than possibly break Winry's heart.

"I'm going to need to call a babysitter for the kids tomorrow," Winry muttered, ticking off on her fingers. "And I'll need to rearrange some appointments so I can go to the doctor's office..." 

Ed just blinked at her. Somehow this was all just so... normal. Well, okay, having a heart attack wasn't exactly _normal_ , maybe, but the way Winry was dealing with it, the way she was worrying and thinking about babysitters and such... Hell, even the fact that it was a heart attack and not something crazy like immortals trying to kill him was just so... so normal. Here he hadn't even thought it would ever be possible for him to have a normal life, and yet somehow this other him had managed it. 

"But no one will be awake right now anyway," Winry said with a sigh, dropping the count on her fingers and turning back to Ed. "We might as well go to bed."

It was then that Ed realized what that implied. He was trying to pretend to be normal until he could talk to Al, but he was still in a world where his double had married Winry. And Winry was saying _they_ should go to bed. Hell, they had two children. There was no way they weren't sharing a bed. Ed decided to count his blessings that he was supposed to be on bed rest, so it wasn't like she would hit on him or anything. As long as it was just sleeping in a bed, then maybe he could just stay on his side of the bed and sleep quietly. That wasn't any worse or different than when they had been kids, right? And then he could talk to Al tomorrow and get everything figured out, and he wouldn't have to keep doing this. He only had to sleep in the same bed as Winry for one night, just to keep up appearances. That was all. That was _all_. 

But when Winry led him into the bedroom and he saw the one double bed, all of the courage Ed had been building up on the way upstairs suddenly left him. He couldn't do this. He couldn't share a bed with Winry, even if he was technically in the body that was married to her. He couldn't do that to the other Ed, or even worse, to _Winry_. She wouldn't know she was sleeping with a stranger. It wasn't fair to do that to her without her knowing. 

"Uh..." Ed darted his eyes nervously around the room before his eyes fell on the armchair by the window. "You know, I think I actually want to sleep sitting up tonight." 

Winry paused as she was pulling back the covers to give him a look. "What?"

"Yeah, yeah," Ed said, grabbing a pillow from the side of the bed Winry wasn't climbing into. "It's easier to breathe sitting up." 

"Are you having trouble breathing?" Winry dropped the covers she had been pulling back, no longer climbing into bed. Shit. Backtrack, backtrack. 

"No, no," Ed said quickly, and Winry raised an eyebrow. Right, if he wasn't having trouble breathing, there was no reason to sleep in the armchair. "Um, I just... Um... Well, it's because I wasn't breathing well when I was panicking earlier. It'll die down in a little bit, I just need to sit up for now to fall asleep." 

"Okay..." Winry said. "Well, we could arrange some pillows to prop you up on the bed."

"No, no, this is fine," Ed said, backing over to the armchair with his pillow. "I'm sure I'll be feeling better in an hour or two, and I don't want you to keep having to rearrange the bed." 

"Aren't you going to change into your pajamas?" Winry said, frowning at him. "Your clothes are all muddy, please don't sleep in them." 

"Oh," Ed said, glancing down at himself. Sure enough, his white button-up shirt and black vest were still covered in mud. Even his pants had a bit of mud on them. Winry was already in her nightgown because apparently, she'd just thrown a coat over it before heading out to look for him in the rain. Ed had a sudden pang of sympathy for her. She must have been so worried about her husband, rushing out into the cold and wet without even bothering to do more than throw on a coat. 

But still, Ed had no idea where his pajamas theoretically were. He didn't even normally see much bother to them. He had been used to sleeping in his boxers until Noah had moved in, honestly. 

"Uh, pajamas..." Ed said, glancing around the room. Winry chuckled with a slight sigh and shook her head. 

"I swear, you'd forget your head if it wasn't attached," she said. "They should be in the pajama drawer. That is, if you remembered to put them away this time." 

"Uh..." Ed glanced over at the dresser, feeling lost. The pajama drawer? Which one even was that? Was Winry going to look at him funny just because he didn't have any idea where his pajamas would be? Probably. He was supposed to be completely used to this world, and he didn't even know where his pajamas were.

Winry frowned at his hesitation, moving away from the bed and over to the dresser, where she pulled open the top right drawer and tossed a flannel shirt and pants to Ed. They managed to hit him in the face before he caught up with what was happening and caught them before they fell to the ground. 

"Uh..." Ed looked down at the pajamas and then back up at Winry, who was just watching him expectantly. Oh god. Of course there was no shame between her and her Ed when it came to things like stripping down and changing into new clothes. They'd had two kids together, after all. Winry had definitely.... _seen_ parts of this body he didn't even want to think about, but it still felt like _his_ body, and it still felt like something Winry had never seen before, at least to him. 

"Are you absolutely sure you're okay?" Winry said, frowning at him as he stood there holding the pajamas and looking between them and her with wide eyes. 

"Uh, yeah, yeah, of course," Ed said, wincing. Okay, his options were to either act normal, which meant changing into pajamas in front of the woman who was theoretically his wife, or telling her everything that was going on and breaking her heart probably worse than it had ever been broken before. Ed bit his lip and began unbuttoning his vest. Winry had seen him in just his boxers plenty of times before anyway for automail maintenance. It wasn't like this was anything spectacularly new. He was just nervous because he knew that this Winry knew what was _under_ the boxers, but she would know that whether he took off his other clothes or not. This was fine. Everything was fine. _Stop acting like a virgin and just be the Ed she expects you to be, you dumbass._

"I really wish you would sleep in the bed," Winry said softly. "I'm really worried about you, Ed." 

Ed paused in the middle of pulling on the shirt and looked at her. She looked like she was about to cry, and all because he was refusing to sleep in the same bed as her. And here he was trying to pretend to be normal and like everything was fine. Clearly, he wasn't managing to succeed at that if she was on the verge of tears. Maybe he could just... make it work somehow. For Winry's sake. It would only be one night, after all. 

"You know, I think my breathing is better now," Ed mumbled, looking down at the buttons as he fastened them. "I think I could sleep in the bed now."

"I'd definitely worry a lot less," Winry said, coming over to him and then rubbing at his cheek. "You've still got mud on your face. You should wash up before bed." 

"Right," Ed said as she gave him a kiss on the cheek, smoothing his bangs out of the way. She then turned and moved to sit on the bed, and Ed took the moment of her being turned away as a chance to hurriedly pull off his pants and pull on the flannel ones. "I'll just... go wash up, then." 

Last Ed could remember, there hadn't been indoor plumbing at the Rockbell house, at least not in terms of a hot shower. They had a couple of sinks around the house just for the sheer necessity that came with doing automail surgery, and even those had been incredibly hard to get installed. Ed wasn't particularly keen on taking a shower out in the cold and rain after he'd just gotten out of it. So he figured he would just wash his face off in the kitchen sink and take a proper shower in the morning. So he padded down to the kitchen in his socks, Winry still sitting on the bed. 

Except the water in the kitchen tap apparently didn't want to come out hot. No matter how much Ed tried to wait for it while it ran, it seemed that it was just too cold outside for the water heater to actually have a decent chance. Ed sighed and grabbed a bowl, collecting the water. Sure, he could just put up with the cold water, but why? Once the bowl was full, he put it on the counter and turned off the tap, taking a deep breath. 

"Time to see if this still works," he muttered under his breath before clapping his hands together. A flash of blue light later, and the water was steaming. Ed smirked to himself. _Still got it._

" _H-H-How_ did you do that?"

Ed turned to see Winry standing in the kitchen archway, staring at him with wide, almost horrified eyes. Ed frowned at her. 

"It's just alchemy, Winry, what's the big deal?"

"The big deal?" Winry made a choked sound. "You haven't been able to do alchemy in years!"

"Uh..." Ed blinked. Shit. _Shit_. This Ed hadn't been able to do alchemy? What the hell was up with that? "Uh... I guess... The... The heart attack reset my brain a little?"

"Reset your brain?!" Winry squawked. "Since when can a _heart attack_ undo a sacrifice to the _Gate_?" 

This time it was Ed's turn to make a choking sound. "A _what_?" What the hell had this Ed been up to, anyway?

"You know what, we're calling Al," Winry said, shaking her head and grabbing Ed by the wrist before leading him out to the living room. "I don't care if it's the middle of the night. He would want to wake up to know you've gotten your alchemy back." 

Ed felt the blood drain from his face. He wasn't sure if he even _could_ backtrack his way out of this one. 

* * *

Ed could feel the headache hitting him hard before he even opened his eyes. Sometimes it really sucked to not be a teenager anymore. It seemed like punches were falling a little harder with every year. 

Wait, had he even been punched? Ed struggled to remember what had happened last, blearily cracking his eyes open. Winry was standing over him, wearing that same worried expression she always did. Usually that meant he'd done something stupid. Ed sighed and held a hand to his head. 

"Sorry," Ed muttered, struggling to sit up. "I'm fine, I promise." 

It was then that Ed noticed as he tried to push himself into a sitting position that he couldn't actually _feel_ the pavement against his right hand. Instead, he felt a familiar throbbing of pressure in his shoulder, like a metal device was _digging_ against him from the pressure he was putting on his arm. _No_. 

Ed was sitting up in an instant, holding his right arm out in front of him as if it were alien. At a first glance, it looked like a normal hand, but Ed was too familiar with his own skin. Something about it was just... off. The color wasn't quite right, and on top of that, the skin folded in a weird, unnatural way when he flexed his fingers. Maybe not something big enough for the average person on the street to notice, but he could definitely tell that this wasn't his arm, and if he couldn't feel his arm, that meant this was automail. But when had automail gotten to look this realistic?

Wait. _Wait_ Ed's mind flashed back to the cemetery, how he had been worried about a heart attack, and then he'd fallen, and then... Oh god. He'd died, and now he was standing here and okay, somehow. Okay, so Truth had apparently taken his arm again. Sure, whatever. That was worth it if it meant he would actually still have a chance to be with his kids. He turned to look at Winry, tears in his eyes. 

"Winry," he said, his voice cracking as one of the tears slipped down his cheek. "Oh thank god. I thought—"

He wrapped his arms around her, pulling her into a deep, relieved kiss. But almost as soon as he had started kissing her, she suddenly broke off the kiss, pulling away from him with a gasp. He had only barely registered what was happening before she drew her hand across his face with a loud slap.

Ed took a step backward, holding his right hand up the cradle his suddenly sore cheek. "Winry?"

Winry started yelling at him then, jabbing a finger into his chest, but Ed suddenly realized that he couldn't understand a single word she was saying. It didn't sound like pure gibberish, there was definitely form and structure to it, which implied she was speaking another language, but Ed couldn't even place what language she was speaking. This girl sure looked like Winry, and sounded like Winry, and even was _acting_ exactly like Ed expected of Winry, but she _had_ to be someone else. Winry knew maybe a handful of phrases in Xingese and that was it. Ed would almost think that maybe she'd learned another language in her spare time in order to play a prank on him, but _what_ spare time would she have to do that, anyway? And _why_? No, this just had to be another girl. 

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" Ed said, putting his hands up. He hoped she would at least understand that much. "I'm sorry, I thought you were someone else!" 

_Boy,_ did she look like Winry though, down to the exact expressions she made as she continued chewing him out. It was unnerving really. Ed wasn't sure if he would even be able to tell her and Winry apart if they were standing side by side. She yelled a couple more sentences at him in her language, and then she was storming off. 

It was then that Ed realized he didn't have any idea where he was. The last thing he could remember was being in the Resembool cemetery, but this definitely wasn't Resembool or even anywhere close to Resembool, because he had never seen this city before. But how could he have gotten that far? Truth didn't just... drop people off somewhere halfway across the country as payment, right? That didn't even make sense as a payment. That couldn't be right. Maybe he'd just gotten taken to a different city because of the heart attack or something. 

The thought crossed Ed's mind that it didn't really make sense why Truth would also take his arm as payment but give him automail without rehab. Ed didn't want to dwell on the thought. He wasn't really sure what that would mean, and that was a terrifying thing to consider. 

"Um, excuse me-" Ed said, running up to a man on the sidewalk and tapping on his shoulder. The man turned around to look at Ed, then snapped a question at him in the same set of sounds Not-Winry had been making earlier. Oh no. Ed spun in the other direction, waving to get someone, anyone's attention. 

"Excuse me—!"

Several people looked at him with weird expressions, and one man shouted at him with even more of those words with the same sounds. Ed felt his stomach drop to his feet. Oh _no. Shit_. It wasn't just a weird Winry lookalike who was a foreigner. _He_ was the foreigner. Somehow, he had ended up in who knows what country, where the people all spoke a language he had never heard before. What was he going to do?

He was interrupted from his panic by a soft voice behind him. 

"Edvard?"

Oh, thank goodness. At least his name was something he could recognize, even with the accent. At least there was one person here who recognized him. If someone recognized him, that must mean they spoke Amestrian. He took in a relieved breath and turned to look at who had called him. 

And found himself face to face with none other than—

"Lust!" Ed yelped, taking a step backward and holding his hands up defensively. She frowned at him and said something in that same language everyone else was speaking. Ed practically wanted to scream. Here he was, looking at someone who was theoretically supposed to be _dead_ , hearing her speak this language he had never heard before. 

"I have no idea what you're saying!" Ed snapped. "But if you try anything, I swear—!"

Lust sighed at him and said another string of words Ed couldn't understand, but this time with one word he could recognize: _Alphonse_. 

"Have you done something with him?" Ed said, feeling a heavy lump slide to the bottom of his stomach. "Where is he?" 

Lust sighed and said something more in that language, glancing away and down the street. She turned back to Ed with a sigh. "Alphonse," she said, pointing down the street that she had just been looking down. She then curled her fingers at Ed in the universal sign for _come here_. Before Ed could fully figure out what she was getting at, she was turning and walking in the direction she had pointed, her shoes clicking against the cobblestones. Ed blinked. Oh. She wanted him to follow her. 

Ed took a step after her, and then froze. Really? He thought he was past the days of randomly following homunculi down streets he didn't know just because he wanted information. But what else was he supposed to do? It sounded like she knew where Al was, and if Al was also in this country, then he was likely as scared and confused as Ed. But what if she was just leading him into a trap? Lust paused in her steps and looked back at him, crossing her arms. 

It was just a chance he was going to have to take. Ed bit his lip and walked over to Lust. She nodded and turned again, leading Ed at a brisk pace through the winding streets. 

By the time Ed had managed to question his actions several times, Lust was leading him to a modest building. Funny. It didn't look like some sort of homunculi hideout or something. And when Lust led him inside and up the stairs to a door, it still just seemed perfectly normal. Normal stairs, normal door with the number 14 on it. Lust knocked on the door, and Ed wondered if it was some sort of code. 

It was funny, actually, how quickly he could snap back to State Alchemist espionage mode, Ed thought, right as the door swung open. 

The woman behind the door was close to his age, with dark skin and even darker hair with a couple of braids poking out through the hair she had down. Ed frowned at her. Something about her was familiar, but he couldn't quite place it. It was like she was someone he had met a long time ago. Lust was saying something more in that weird language, and the woman was paying attention to her. 

_„Danke, Else,"_ the woman said, then turned to Ed with a concerned frown on her face, saying more in that language Ed couldn't understand, but this time too fast and with too many words to understand. Then it suddenly clicked for Ed why she looked familiar. She was older, and her hair didn't have the pink bangs, and Ed swore he remembered her paler, but...

"Rosé?" Ed said, leaning forward to look more closely at her face, still not entirely sure if this was actually the same girl he'd met briefly so many years ago. She shot him a funny look that he couldn't quite place. It wasn't like she didn't recognize the name Rosé, but more like hearing that name worried her. Was she working with the homunculi under a fake name or something?

"I'm just looking for Alphonse," Ed sighed, and the woman's eyebrows shot up like she was surprised. 

_„Al ist—"_ she said, pointing over her shoulder. Ed didn't have to hear any more before he was pushing past her in the direction she'd pointed. He needed to know Al was okay. He needed at least _one_ person to speak the same freaking language as him. 

Al was in the kitchen, grating peeled potatoes into a bowl. When Ed came in, he beamed and put the potato down. 

_„Ah, hallo, Bruder!"_ And then he was off, babbling in the other language that baffled Ed. Ed felt like his world was crumbling around him. Al didn't even look like he normally did, his hair a darker shade and his eyes a blue-gray instead of golden. But he was talking just like Al, acting just like Al. It was like everything and everyone around him was just a few degrees off from where they were supposed to be. Al then paused in what he was saying, looking over Ed with a frown. _„Wo ist die Eier?"_

"What is going on? Why can't I understand _anyone_?!" Ed screamed, clapping his hands to his head and sinking to his knees. Al was immediately rushing over with a frown, putting a hand on Ed's shoulder. 

"Whoa, hang on, what's happening?" Al said, and miraculously, Ed actually understood him that time. Ed turned to look at Al with wide, watery eyes. 

"Wait, you _do_ speak Amestrian?" 

"Of course I speak Amestrian," Al said with a frown. In the distance, Ed could hear the sound of the front door closing. "We just normally practice our German because Noah—" 

He was cut off mid-sentence by the dark-haired woman from earlier coming in and jabbing a finger at Ed. _„Alphonse. Das ist nicht Edward."_ She was doing that same accent Lust had, pronouncing the w in his name like a v. 

_„Was?"_ Al stood up to look at her, his hand still on Ed's shoulder, like he was protecting Ed. The woman was babbling in the other language, and Al seemed to understand her. Ed took the minute to let his mind spin with all the new information he'd just gotten. Al spoke Amestrian. At least someone understood him. But Al also seemed to understand this other language everyone else spoke. And he didn't look exactly like Al. He seemed to recognize Ed, and he acted the same, but he looked just that slight bit different. Hell, he still looked so... young. He looked more like the Al that was in the wedding pictures Ed had hanging at home than the Al he had just seen a few months ago. 

"Hey," Al said, crouching down so he was on eye-level with Ed. Ed realized he should probably get off the floor, but he wasn't sure if his own legs would even support him. "Who are you?" 

"Edward Elric. Who are you?" Ed said flatly. All he wanted was to lay down in a bed, pull the covers over his head, and hope everything went away with a good night's sleep. 

"Alphonse Elric," Al said, giving Ed a weak smile. "What's the last thing you remember?"

"The—" Ed almost said "Gate," but then he bit his tongue. What if this was all some clever trick by the homunculi or something? After all, it had been Lust who had brought him here, of all people. Ed swallowed and looked at Al. "The cemetery. I went for a walk to clear my head." 

Al sighed. "That doesn't help. I'm trying to figure out if you have amnesia. I need more... significant events. Do you remember living in Germany? Working on rockets? Eckhart and her portal?"

"What?" Ed hissed, his face adopting an expression of utter confusion. "No, no... None of that. You just told me you and Mei are engaged." 

Al blinked and frowned. "Um, who?" 

"Mei Chang," Ed groaned. "You know, the kid Scar practically adopted? The kickass Xingese princess? Come on, Al, you brought her as your date to my wedding!"

"What?" Al said, his eyebrows shooting up. "Your wedding to _who_?"

"Uh, _Winry_?"

The dark-haired woman jumped in with something in the other language, and even though Ed had no idea what she was saying, it sounded angry. Al responded back with something that sounded like he was telling her to calm down, based on what Ed knew of how Al spoke. This language barrier was exhausting.

"Um," Al said, turning back to Ed. "What... year do you last remember in Amestris?"

"Easy, 1922," Ed said with a wave of his hand. "My birthday is coming up in a few weeks."

Al stared at Ed with wide eyes, his mouth hanging open slightly. "The... The last time we saw Amestris, it was 1917 there." 

Ed frowned. "I don't understand." 

"Um..." Al sighed, looking over at the woman, then looking back to Ed. "This is going to be hard to explain, but I think you're from a parallel world." 

Ed frowned at Al. It felt like the more he figured out, the more he realized just how big of a mess he'd gotten himself into. "We're going to be up all night, aren't we? I'm getting too old for this shit."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I totally forgot to mention in the last chapter that this story's title is totally a reference to the song in The Greatest Showman. Because when I was initially brainstorming what to do for this story, I ended up listening to that particular song, and I just pictured both Ed singing it to each other, one wanting to be wild and free and the other one with his "uptown part" he gets to play... So yes, the reference in the title and this chapter's title is absolutely intentional.
> 
> Also, I just want to apologize in advance to any native German speakers who might stumble on this. I took four years of German back in high school, so I'm trying to rely on that and not Google translate, but I was never really fluent, so... All I'm really going to be able to do is the occasional sentence here and there. I'm sorry if it's terrible; it's been years since my German classes!


	3. Dreaming Through Someone Else's Eyes

Ed frowned and reached for his cup of coffee, only to find it was empty. Oh, right. That was already his second cup of coffee for the night, if you didn't count the couple cups he'd had back in his world before he'd shown up here. Of course those didn't count though. That caffeine couldn't hurt him here, not when he was apparently in an entirely different body. 

"So is all this parallel world stuff why you look so young?" He leaned his head on his arms on the coffee table in front of him, looking over to Al. Early morning sun was just barely starting to peek in through the windows. It was just him and Al now. Noah had eventually gotten tired of relying on Al to translate between her and Ed and she'd stormed off to bed. Ed got the vague feeling she was mad at him for something, but he had no idea what. 

"What're you talking about?" Al said, tilting his head back to get the last sip of his own coffee. "When I got my body back, I was the same age I was before I was armor. It was like my personal clock was... frozen or something." 

Ed stared at Al with wide eyes. "Your body stayed frozen in time while you were in the armor?"

"Well, we're assuming that's what happened," Al said with a shrug. "My body looked like it was that age when Rosé found me, so everyone just assumed... And back then I couldn't remember anything that had happened on our journey, so it just made sense to say I was ten, because that was the last age I could remember being."

"You couldn't even remember anything that had happened?" Ed choked, sitting up and instinctively reaching out to grab Al's sleeve, as if he could protect this baby brother from things that had already happened.

"Yeah, but it's fine," Al said with a practiced smile. "I mean, I got all my memories back when I came over to this side of the Gate, so..."

"You two have really been through the wringer, huh? I mean, your timeline just chewed you up and spat you back out," Ed said, his forehead creased in a deep frown. Al rolled his eyes and snorted slightly, making Ed blink at him.

"Oh, come on," Al said. "I'm sure you had plenty of terrible things happen in your timeline too. I mean, you had to have gone through some big stuff if you managed to get your Al's body back."

"Eh, I guess..." Ed trailed off with a shrug. "I mean, Dad turned out to have an evil twin who wasn't actually his twin but God instead, and then I punched him in the face or whatever. "

Al blinked at Ed with wide eyes. "...What." 

Ed shrugged with a smirk. "I think we're going to need more coffee if we're going to go over all of that." 

Al sighed and looked down at his cup, then up at the windows that were slowly brightening the room. "I'm going to have to start getting ready for work soon, actually." 

"Oh." Ed frowned and leaned back against the sofa behind him. Somehow he had ended up sitting on the floor even though there was a perfectly good sofa. Maybe it was because there he could rest his head on the table while he listened to Al. "Are you going to be able to handle that after pulling an all-nighter?"

"Of course," Al said with a grin. "I'm five years younger than you. My body still knows how to run on sugar and adrenaline for 48 hours straight, unlike your old man body." 

"Ouch!" Ed said with a laugh, holding his hands to his chest as if he'd been shot. "You know, as if it's not bad enough for someone to call me old, it had to be my younger brother, of all people. You _traitor_." 

Al shrugged with a grin as he stood up, grabbing Ed's and his mugs from the table. "Well, I'm too terrible at lying to do anything other than tell the truth. It's not my fault you don't _like_ the truth." 

Ed rolled his eyes with a small smile, pushing himself into a standing position. It was weird just how easy it was to converse with Al, despite this not being _his_ Al, despite the age difference, despite how different of lives they'd had. Somehow he was still just... Al. Ed couldn't seem to help but just talk to him the same way he always had. Or, the same way he had always talked to his Al, at least. Ed frowned. This parallel world thing was really starting to get to his head. 

"Do I have some sort of job to get to or something?" he said, following Al into the kitchen area. "Because I'm not sure my old man body is up to the task."

 _Especially not when I wouldn't even know how to do my job, let alone how to even talk to anyone_ , Ed thought to himself. 

"No," Al said, pulling a can out of a cupboard along with a can opener and a dish. "You and Noah usually go out and perform for tips, but honestly, you won't get good tips when you're tired and Noah's cranky, so you might as well just skip it today." 

"Hm." Ed frowned and leaned against the counter, crossing his arms over his chest. Okay, so apparently it hadn't just been in his head that Noah was upset about something, because Al had noticed it too. "Did I... Do something to upset her?" 

"No," Al said with a long sigh. "She's... She has a lot on her mind, that's all." 

And apparently, her and the Ed from this world generally spent the day together. Ed wasn't entirely sure how he was going to manage that when they didn't even know how to talk to one another. But before he could question Al further, Al was dumping the contents of the can into the dish, then leaning down to put the dish on the ground and making kissy noises. 

"Muh-Muh!" he called out in a singsong voice. 

"What..." Ed frowned at Al. "Don't tell me you have a cat? I thought you guys were struggling to even feed yourselves properly." 

"It's more of that the cat has us, I think. He followed Ed home one day and just... never left," Al said with a laugh, and then frowned at the still untouched food dish. "He's also lazy. He's waiting to see if I'll bring his food to him. Muh-Muh! Wo sind Sie?"

There was a crash from the room that Ed knew was the bedroom his double and Al shared. After a minute, a large, _round_ black and white cat came waddling out of the bedroom, making his way over to to the food dish with judging eyes. 

"If you're struggling to eat, why is he so..."

"I don't know," Al sighed. "He came to us like this, and no matter what I feed him, he stays like this. I think he must be sneaking out at night and getting food from the neighbors too."

"But... He's the one who moved into your place," Ed said with a laugh. "Why don't you just... not feed him and let him get his food elsewhere?"

"I couldn't do that!" Al said as he put the can opener away. "And besides, he starts breaking into the cabinets and eating our food if we don't feed him." 

"Al, your life is being dictated by a _cat_ ," Ed said with a laugh. Al shrugged. 

"Worth it." 

They watched Muh-Muh eat in silence for a minute before Al sighed and turned to the kitchen, pulling out a pan and more potatoes. It seemed like most of their diet was potatoes. Apparently the menu last night had been scheduled to be some sort of... potato cake, if Ed understood correctly, but that recipe had been reliant on eggs to hold the potato shreds together. And his double had apparently been the one tasked with getting eggs, which of course, had never happened. So instead Al had just taken the grated potato bits and fried them as they were along with some seasonings. It wasn't entirely similar to the food Ed was used to having in Amestris, but there was still something vaguely familiar about it. Maybe because it was Al's cooking, and Al couldn't help but add a little Amestrian flavor to his cooking. This time it looked like Al was just dicing the potatoes instead. 

"So... You really think this might just go away with time?" Ed said with a sigh. 

"Maybe. I don't know," Al said with a shrug and a frown as he chopped the potatoes. "It's not exactly what happened with me and the other Al, but you didn't come here like Brother did, so... Who really knows how it works?" 

"The other Al?" Ed frowned and leaned forward. 

"Yeah, the... Uh... The Al from this world," Al said, his voice getting soft and his eyes not meeting Ed's. "He and Ed were living together back when I was still in our world, and sometimes I had dreams through this Al's eyes. But it wasn't like what you're doing right now. I was just a powerless observer. All I could was watch the other Al live his life. I didn't take complete control like whatever is going on with you and Brother." 

"Fascinating," Ed murmured with a frown. He glanced over at Al's skillet of potatoes. "So what happened when you showed up here? Do you still get dreams of what he's doing?" 

"Uh, no," Al said with a frown, jabbing at the potatoes with a wooden spoon. "He, uh, died."

"What?" Ed yelped, no longer leaning casually against the counter. "Are you saying two doubles can't exist in the same world? Am I and the other Ed going to be okay?" 

"No, no!" Al turned towards Ed with wide eyes. "He died from a bullet wound, not because I showed up! I'm sure two doubles can exist simultaneously in the same world!"

"Okay," Ed said, biting his lip. "Well, then if there was an Al in this world, there must have been an Ed too. Where's he?" 

"Uh..." Al looked back to his potatoes, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. "Um... He... died..."

"Are you fucking kidding me? How are you so sure two doubles can exist simultaneously? Have you ever seen that _actually_ happening?"

"Well, but, they both died because of other things!" 

"Okay, so how did this world's Ed die?" 

Al swallowed, staring at the potatoes as they sizzled, his eyes wide. Ed grabbed Al's sleeve. He didn't like how it looked like Al didn't have any blood left in his face at all. 

"Alphonse Elric, how did this world's Ed die?"

"I... I don't want to say." 

Ed shook Al's sleeve slightly. "Refusing to tell me won't protect me. It might even do the opposite of protecting me, because I won't be able to be aware of a potential threat. Alphonse. Tell me."

"Um..." Al licked his lips and turned to look at Ed with wide eyes. "Brother showed up in this world once before, where he was in the body of this world's Ed."

Ed's eyes widened with the implication of that. "Wait, and he had control? So it's like what's going on now? But what's that got to do with death?"

"Brother said he didn't really know what was going on," Al said with a deep sigh. "And... And he accidentally got killed."

"But then what happened?" Ed said with a frown. 

"He... came back to his original body. And the Ed from here..." 

"He was just dead because of that little shit's mistake?" Ed screeched, his hands flying to his hair. "Oh shit. Oh _shit_! And that idiot's running around in _my_ body now?! I'm screwed! I'm so fucking screwed!"

He was interrupted from his panic by the sound of a door slamming, and when he turned to look, Noah was standing just outside the door, her hands on her hips. _„Halt’s Maul!“_

 _"Noah!"_ Al snapped, slamming the spoon down on the counter. Ed glanced over at Al with a frown.

"What? What did she say?" 

"Uh..." Al shrugged. "Shut up, basically." 

Ed raised an eyebrow. That didn't seem like something Al would snap at someone over, but maybe it had different context here. But he didn't have a chance to ask Al for further context, because Al was already off on a lecture to Noah, and Noah was angrily arguing back. Al huffed at her and picked up the wooden spoon, going back to stirring the potatoes. 

"I don't have time for this," Al muttered under his breath. "I have to get to work. Bro- Er, Ed, could you get the plates for me?"

Ed felt like his heart fell to his feet and shattered a little at the sound of Al correcting himself so he wouldn't call Ed his brother. But that was fair, and it wouldn't be fair to expect that of Al. It just hurt in a sense beyond words to realize that Al didn't consider Ed his brother. He wasn't this Al's brother, though, not really. He just happened to be wearing the meat suit that was biologically related to this Al. 

But seeing the words come out of the mouth of someone who looked so much like his actual brother made Ed homesick and heartbroken in a way that felt bigger than his own existence. 

"Uh, sure. Which cabinet are they in?" Ed croaked out, his voice low and soft. He hoped Al would think it was because of Noah yelling. Al directed him to the cabinet on the end while he kept stirring the potatoes, not looking up. Maybe he hadn't even noticed anything off about the way Ed was talking. 

Al took the fried potatoes and divided them between the three plates, and the three of them sat down at the table in silence. Ed hung his head and focused on eating the potatoes. He wasn't entirely sure what to say, not when he didn't even know why Noah was so tense, or what she and Al had been arguing about. Had it been because of something she'd said that made Al correct himself when he started saying "Brother," or had that been just because of Al's own feelings? Ed wasn't even sure which explanation he'd prefer. 

There ended up being silence between the three of them until Al finished eating. Which was something to say, considering Al was usually the slowest eater in any group. But Ed and Noah were mostly pushing potatoes around their plates and only occasionally taking a bite.

"Okay," Al said after he finished his last bite, setting his fork down on the plate with a soft clink before turning to Ed. "I have to go to work. I recommend you just get some sleep and just..." He glanced over at Noah. "...Just stay low-key and out of one another's way. We'll figure out more tonight. There's not much to do here, but... You're welcome to read any books we have around." 

Ed gave Al a weak smile and nodded. Somehow, Al was only eighteen here, and he was already so mature. Or maybe he always had been that mature, and it took seeing Al so much younger to understand just how mature he really was. Could Ed claim he would have been that calm and mature in the face of someone yelling at him when he was eighteen? 

_„Und Noah..."_ Al said, turning to her with a sigh. He then said something to her that sounded like some sort of lecture, if Ed knew anything about Al. Whatever he was saying definitely had some sort of effect on Noah, her face crumbling and shoulders slumping. She shot Ed a quick glance as Al spoke, immediately whipping her face back when she saw Ed was looking at her. Al finished with some sort of question, after which Noah gave him a long, hard stare. 

_„Ja,"_ she finally said with a huff. Al said something in response to that, and then Noah stormed off to her room, closing the door forcefully behind her. At least she wasn't slamming it anymore, Ed noted. 

"What did you say to her?" Ed said with a frown, looking away from the bedroom door and over to Al. 

"I just reminded her that Brother gave her more of a chance when he first met her than she's giving you now," Al said with a sigh. Ed itched with questions at that, but Al was already pulling on his coat. Besides, Al usually wasn't vague for no reason. But, it hardly seemed fair that he was an Ed himself, and still secrets of this other Ed's life were being kept from him.

"By the way, there's something you should know about Noah," Al said, pulling on a scarf. "I'm only going to tell you myself instead of letting her because she said she'd prefer me telling you, and you honestly need to know."

"Oh." Ed frowned and stood up, leaning his hands on the table. "What is it?"

Al took a deep breath and then looked Ed straight in the eyes. "Noah can see into anyone's memories if she touches them."

Ed swallowed. He prided on knowing Al pretty damn well after everything they'd been through. This Al hadn't been through the same things as him, but this was still Al, and Ed knew he'd be able to tell in a second if Al was lying to him. No, Al was absolutely dead serious. And honestly, telepathy hardly seemed like the weirdest thing they'd ever seen. Ed sighed. "Okay."

"Okay?" Al said, raising his eyebrows. "You're not skeptical?"

"Nah, I trust you," Ed said, straightening up and stretching his back a little. Sitting on the floor for hours, pulling an all-nighter, and having automail again certainly weren't doing him any favors. "Does it get... I dunno, dampened by clothes?"

"No," Al said, shaking his head and pulling on a scarf. "But emotions will affect it. If you're feeling really strongly, she can see more. That's why she immediately knew you weren't the right Ed last night."

And here Ed had been beating himself up all night thinking it was because he'd slipped up and called her Rosé in his confusion. Though it's not like he'd really needed to hide who he was from Al and Noah, so maybe it was ultimately better that they'd found out quickly. Then again, it didn't seem like Noah felt that way. Maybe she would have preferred if he'd found a way to pretend to be the other Ed. Oh well, it was too late to backtrack and pretend everything was normal now. 

"Okay, so Noah's psychic. Anything else I should know?"

Al cracked a small grin. Good, he wasn't as angry as earlier. "No, that should be it. Do you think you'll be all set for the day?" 

"I'm sure I'll be fine," Ed said with a smirk and a shrug. "I'm a grown man, Al. You worry too much. You just go have a good day at work." 

"I will," Al said, and then the two had a long minute of silence looking at each other. What was the proper way to end a conversation with your brother's double, anyway? The sort of thing they normally said to each other here was "I love you," but that just seemed like a bit much with someone you hardly knew. Ed chuckled and held his arms out. 

"Uh, want a hug?" That seemed like a safe enough bet. Al beamed. 

"Really? If you're okay with it!"

"Yeah, of course," Ed said with a chuckle, and then Al was thudding against him in a tight hug. Ed squeezed him back, closing his eyes. 

There, in that moment of a hug where Al couldn't see him, he mouthed the words "I love you," and hoped that maybe back in his world, Al was dreaming and would know he was saying it. 

After that, Al left for work, and the house was empty and quiet. Ed sighed at Noah's closed door and went off to the room that he'd been told earlier was for him and Al. Well, his double and Al. What made Ed most embarrassed though was the fact that he didn't even need to be told which bed was his as soon as he stepped in the room. One of the beds was neatly made with the corners tucked in, and the other one was an absolute tangle of sheets and blanket with some papers and a dirty plate thrown on top. Ed hung his head and started clearing the papers and plate off the messy bed. He hadn't even managed to pull the sheets into some sort of order before he had collapsed on the bed in pure exhaustion.

Ed thought that he would end up sleeping through the entire day because of how tired he was, but apparently his parental instincts were stronger than his exhaustion. So when Noah started moving around the apartment, making floorboards creak and moving pots and pans around, well, apparently the parent part of him heard that even while he was dead asleep and told his brain to wake up. 

Which was how Ed ended up awake in his room and unsure what to do with himself as he heard Noah moving around. Al had said to try and stay out of each other's way, and Ed was inclined to agree. But what was he supposed to do? He couldn't very well go out to wander the city when he didn't speak the language and couldn't even read a map. He couldn't even be entirely sure that he understood how this world worked. Like, was it normal that Noah was psychic? Was it just that everyone in this world was psychic? Or just her? 

There was a handful of books on the dresser, which Ed totally picked up and tried to read before realizing of course he wouldn't be able to read books in a language he didn't speak. He and Alphonse had both forgotten that important detail. 

Ed ended up looking around the room, not sure whether it counted as snooping or not. He felt almost like a visitor (even if it was Al), but he also technically lived here. Well, the body he was currently using lived here, which counted for him, right? But with Noah out of her room, that meant Ed was trapped in the bedroom, and if he couldn't read, that left him with nothing to do other than poking around the room. Ed almost considered looking at the books anyway, just to see if he could start figuring out a German word here and there, but he had a feeling it would just frustrate him without Al to help him. 

The most interesting thing he managed to find was a worn suitcase shoved under his bed. There were a bunch of papers inside, covered in his own handwriting. Weird. It was something technical Ed couldn't entirely understand, especially since most of it was written in German. Every now and then, Ed could recognize a word here and there. Some of the Amestrian bits were clearly things his double had never meant for others to read, like the one frustrated scribble that said _"This would be so much easier with alchemy, damn it." _There was another time where the other Ed had apparently thought the best place to write a grocery list was on the side of one of these scientific papers. Other times though, it seemed like the other Ed had just forgotten he was writing in the wrong language, with half a word hastily scribbled out before continuing on in the German. 

And buried underneath all these papers was a small book covered in worn leather. Ed turned it over in his hands a couple of times before flipping open to the first page. 

_3.10.1921_

_No one in this world will understand this language anyway, so I guess I don't have to bother with a code anymore. Relief? Not really. I feel like shit today, but I guess that's expected-_

Ed stared at the book with wide eyes before slamming it shut and putting it back on the bed. Okay, maybe this other Ed was his double, but reading the other guy's journal still seemed invasive. Was it possible to snoop on your other self, anyway? It didn't matter, Ed still felt like he was intruding on things he had no business messing with. Which was especially weird when it was concerning something written in _his_ language, in _his_ handwriting. 

"Ed?" There was a quiet knock at the door, and Ed looked over with wide eyes. He closed the suitcase and shoved it back under the bed before standing up and going over to the door. What would Noah want with him, anyway? 

"Um, yes?" he said as he opened the door. Noah gave him a weak smile. Huh. Was she not mad at him anymore?

"Ed... hungry?" she said pantomiming eating. Ed blinked at her. 

"Wait, you can speak Amestrian?" Noah hummed and bit her lip. 

"Tiny." 

Ed frowned, thinking for a minute that maybe she was making a jab at his height before he realized she meant she could only speak a tiny bit of Amestrian. Had Al and the other Ed been teaching her? They must have, since no one else in this world even knew the language. 

(He didn't want to think about why "tiny" would have been important enough for her to remember in her handful of words.)

"Um... Yes. Hungry," Ed said, giving her a grin and rubbing at the back of his neck with his left hand. "Food?"

"Food," Noah agreed with a nod, moving away from the door. Ed followed behind her and was greeted by the smell of cabbage and potatoes. Noah was in front of a large pot in the kitchen, ladling soup into a bowl. He had no idea what had caused the sudden change of heart for her to have gone from yelling at him to suddenly serving him food, but he wasn't about to complain. Especially not when the food smelled so good and his stomach felt so empty.

"Any chance I could get another cup of coffee?" Ed said before realizing he should have maybe said less if he wanted Noah to have a better chance of understanding him. She looked away from the pot and frowned at him. 

_„Kaffee?"_ she said. Ed could vaguely remember Al saying the same word the night before at some point, so he nodded, and Noah's eyebrows scrunched together even more. "Very... Ah... Very... _very_ money." 

Ed blinked at her for a minute, trying to put together what she was saying. "Oh, are you saying it's expensive?" 

Noah's eyes lit up like she recognized the word, and she nodded frantically at Ed. He felt his stomach slide to his feet. Coffee was apparently really expensive here, and Al hadn't even hesitated to make him not just one, but _two_ mugs of it the other night. Of course he had though. He was Al. He would find a way to give the moon to Ed if Ed asked him. 

"Okay, no coffee," Ed said with a wave of his hand. "Just soup."

Noah smiled and held out the bowl of soup she had been serving. _„Die Suppe."_

 _„Die Suppe,"_ Ed repeated with a grin. At least now he knew two words, coffee and soup. But just as he reached to take the bowl of soup from her, his right arm suddenly left out a metallic screech and fell limp to his side. Ed stared at his arm in horror. It had sounded like the dying screams of some sort of animal, not like the sort of sound any automail should ever make. _  
_

"Shit," Ed murmured, looking down at his arm, soup forgotten. Noah frowned.

"I... fixing?" 

"What, can you?" Ed said, looking away from the arm and up at her. Noah bit her lip. 

"Touching." 

Ed frowned for a minute, trying to figure out what she was getting at. Touching? Had he touched his arm to something he shouldn't have? And then it suddenly clicked for him and he almost felt embarrassed. She was asking for permission to touch him. God, had people really been cruel enough to refuse to touch her just because she could see into their memories? 

Yes, yes people would absolutely be that cruel, Ed realized as he looked at her terrified face. Of course they would be. 

"Noah," he said softly, and then reached out to lay a hand gently on her shoulder. She jumped at the contact and looked at him with wide eyes. "Touching yes. I'm not scared of you." 

Something in Noah broke then, and tears started streaming down her face. "Edward." 

More than even when Al had dropped some tantalizing hints, Ed found that he was so curious to know what all had happened when Noah and his double had met. Had he been scared when he'd heard of her power? Or had he accepted it immediately like Ed was doing now? Judging from Noah's reaction, Ed was more inclined to guess the second. 

"I fixing," Noah said, wiping the tears away and reaching for Ed's arm. She braced a hand first on the back side of his automail, right at his shoulder, and then she reached up and gave his shoulder joint a hard smack. Ed nearly yelped in surprise. _This_ was considered "fixing" automail? Winry would kill him, she'd never- Oh, wait. Right. It was a miracle he even had automail, really. But to his surprise, the unorthodox method actually worked, and his arm was moving again. Noah must have seen that problem come up several times before if she knew exactly how to fix it. 

"Huh," he said, flexing his fingers and looking down. "There must be a loose wire in there that keeps getting jostled." 

Noah was pulling away from him, giving him a look like she was trying to figure him out. Ed shrugged at her before turning and poking at his shoulder, wondering if there was a way he could look inside. He was hoping Noah would understand he was just talking to himself. He had no idea how to translate when he was just thinking out loud. But Noah shook her head. 

"You... father?" 

Ed froze in his examination of his arm, his breath catching. He had trusted Al when he'd said Noah was psychic, of course, but it was another thing to see it in action. He hadn't told Al and Noah last night that he and Winry had kids. He knew that knowing that bit of information would make Al feel even worse, even though none of this was Al's fault. Though he had to admit, he hadn't avoided talking about them just to protect Al's feelings. It still hurt to think about them, to wonder how they were managing, even if he hadn't even been gone a full day yet. Was the other Ed putting them down for a nap right now? 

"Yeah," he whispered, slowly moving his eyes to meet Noah's. "Yeah, I'm a father."

There was a long moment between the two of them. Noah eventually turned back to the soup and poured another bowl before grabbing both bowls and carrying them over to the table. Ed shrugged and followed her. His arm having a minor glitch didn't mean he was suddenly incapable of carrying his own soup, but he didn't know how to communicate that many words to Noah without seeming offensive, anyway. 

"Your childrens..." Noah said as she set the bowls on the table. Ed paused, and she turned around to look at him, a smile slowly stretching across her face. "Beautiful." 

Ed smiled back at her, despite the lump in his throat. "They really are, aren't they?" 

The two of them ate their soup mostly in silence. Somehow, it wasn't the same awkward, tense silence that had been present when they had eaten breakfast in silence that morning. The soup surprised Ed a little. It wasn't really _unfamiliar_ food, but it also wasn't _familiar_. The ingredients were similar to a soup he remembered Granny making, but the spices were just a touch different. The potatoes and cabbage even tasted just slightly different. Not enough to not taste like something else; he could still recognize that he was eating cabbage and potatoes. It was just enough to remind him how far away from home he really was. 

_„Die Suppe,"_ Ed said hesitantly, unsure how bad his accent was. Noah looked up at him, her eyes bright and shining. Okay, it was at least good enough that she liked hearing him try. "Um... _Die Suppe_... Delicious?" 

_„Danke schön!"_ Noah said, beaming at him. 

_„Danke schön?"_

_„Ja!_ _Danke schön!_ _"_ Noah nodded. "Ah... Thank you... very!"

Ed tried to hold back a chuckle. Once she wasn't slamming doors and glaring daggers at him, she was actually pretty adorable. "Yes. Thank you very." Normally he would have corrected her, but it wasn't like she was going to end up in Amestris someday and embarrass herself. What did it matter if she said a few things slightly wrong when she would only be using this language with Ed and Al, anyway? And hey, he also had managed to learn a phrase, and a pretty useful one, at that. 

_„Danke schön, Noah,"_ Ed said, and then gestured towards his empty soup bowl. "For... uh... _Die Suppe."_

Noah blinked at him, raising her eyebrows. "You... learner fast!" 

"Yeah. Genius," Ed said with a defeated chuckle. Noah laughed with him, so he was guessing it was a word his other self had used often enough for Noah to learn. He didn't want to spend to long examining what that said about his personality. 

But when he thought about it, he was still learning fairly fast, even for him. After all, this was a language he had never heard before the past 24 hours, and he was already getting comfortable enough to assemble very basic sentences. He was also already feeling pretty comfortable with the sound of German. And when he thought about it, it didn't feel so much like he was learning brand new information as much as remembering something he'd forgotten. The thought fascinated Ed, and he only had two possible ideas about why that was happening. Either the physical brain had managed to hold on to some memories, or he had encountered German in the Gate and then forgotten most of it. Either way, Ed was curious to see if he could unlock more memories about the language. After all, the sooner he learned to speak German, the sooner he wouldn't be struggling to talk with Noah or even go out of the house. 

Ed picked up the bowls as he thought, stacking them together and planning to take them to the sink to wash them off. But before he could get all the way from the table to the sink, his arm went limp again, making him drop the dishes with a loud crash. 

"Agh! Shit!" Ed said, smacking his shoulder angrily. Okay, forget tapping into hidden memories, he needed to fix the damn arm first. It was going to drive him absolutely crazy otherwise. He sighed and bent down, picking up the shards of the dishes with his automail hand. Well, that was admittedly a useful skill he had kind of missed having.

Noah bent down and helped him, bringing over a dustpan and sweeping up the bits he couldn't pick off the floor. He didn't know how to say it with words she would understand, but he was grateful for the quiet support. She wasn't yelling at him or telling him to shut up like she had earlier that morning, she was just helping him pick up yet another one of the messes he seemed to always have around him. 

Once they had managed to get the broken dishes cleaned up and taken care of, Ed sighed and started unbuttoning his vest, and then the shirt underneath. Noah didn't notice at first, preoccupied with taking care of the soup. When she turned around and saw him peeling off his shirt, she sucked in a breath. Ed glanced over at her, raising an eyebrow. 

"Arm," he said, waving his right arm at her. "Uh... automail. Fix. Uh... mechanic... Tiny. Tiny mechanic." 

He nearly screamed as soon as the words left his mouth. He had only thought about how best to communicate to her, not what the words would sound like when they got strung together. Noah noticed his stricken expression and giggled at him, so Ed took a deep breath, shook his head, and tried to go back to focusing on the automail. 

_„Die Automail?"_

Ed paused and looked back at Noah, his shirt unbuttoned but still on him otherwise. Of course she knew that word. It was probably a word his double said all the time. "Uh, yeah, automail." 

Noah nodded and turned in the direction of his and Al's room, gesturing for him to follow her. She immediately went straight for his closet, while Ed sat on the bed and actually pulled off his shirt so he could finally take a decent look at his arm for the first time. But before he had a chance to fully focus his attention on the automail, his attention was first drawn to the large scar in the middle of his chest. It was a massive scar that almost looked like he had been ripped apart, and it kind of reminded him of a scar he had back home, only his was a little lower and more to one side. 

He could remember something Al had said about how he had needed to save Ed and then Ed had decided to sacrifice himself for Al instead. Or whatever a mess of a solution it was, because the explanation had certainly been hard to keep track of. Al had been so distraught even in telling that little bit that Ed had decided not to probe any deeper. It suddenly made sense why Al had needed to save his double, and why he had turned around and sacrificed himself for Al. His double had died. Or at least, it seemed pretty damn likely, with a scar that bad in that vital of a location. 

It was kind of funny, in a weird way. He had also been wounded in a pretty similar way, and he and his Al had also played a bit of a game of sacrifice chicken. Were two Eds just bound to end up with fairly similar lives, even if their worlds were so drastically different? 

Once he had pulled attention away from the scar and was instead paying attention to the automail, he found himself baffled. The entire arm was covered with some sort of rubbery material that looked sort of like skin. It was definitely a nice touch and Ed was surprised the other him had found an innovative solution for hiding his automail, but when Ed squeezed at the covering, it felt like what was under it was pretty rudimentary. It was basically only automail by the most basic of technical definitions. Aka, it at least managed to take energy from his body and signals from his brain in order to operate, but it was only barely managing that, it seemed. Ed was suddenly grateful he hadn't had anything more intense happen other than the interaction with Winry the previous day. He wasn't sure how he would even make this arm move fast enough in a fight, not when it seemed like it was half reliant on clockwork. Hell, it moving that fast would probably generate a ton of heat and destroy the nice skin cover, anyway. 

"Aha!" Noah declared from the closet, and suddenly she was dragging out a giant box. It was too heavy for her to lift, so instead, she just wiggled it out of the closet and motioned for Ed to come over. Without her in the closet, Ed could suddenly see past her and noticed there were a couple tall boxes in the closet that were storing what looked like spare arms and legs. Useful. He wondered why his alternate self hadn't just given up on this half-broken arm and traded it out for a new one, considering he had spares just lying in wait. 

But the best surprise came when Noah wiggled the lid off the box and revealed two shiny limbs. There was no way Ed couldn't recognize exactly whose handiwork it was as soon as he saw it. 

"Winry," he said, his voice tight as he reached out to touch a couple fingers to the metal. The automail definitely wasn't in good shape. The front plate was just taped on, having only one of its screws left, and it looked like it had been used until it had been practically falling off. And the two limbs had been carefully packed away in this box for who knows how long, probably because his alternate self couldn't bear to get rid of the only piece of Winry he had left. Still, it was miles ahead of what was currently on his arm. It looked like he'd probably have to make some major adjustments to Winry's work if he was going to make it work with this world's technology, not to mention all the repairs he'd have to do, but it was at least a much better starting point. 

_„Danke schön, Noah,"_ Ed said, reaching up to wipe away the tear that had fallen down his cheek. God, he hadn't expected to get this choked up just because of automail. After all, he'd only been away from her for a _day_! But it still somehow felt like a precious gift. "This will help. A lot."

But Noah wasn't looking at Ed. Instead, she was staring intently at the journal Ed had thrown on the bed earlier when she had knocked on his door. She turned to him, saying something in German that he was absolutely clueless about, but he heard his own name in there, so he figured she was telling him something about how it didn't belong to him. 

"I know, I know!" he said, standing up and waving his hands. "As soon as I realized what it was, I stopped reading!" 

She had a lot more to say to him about that, babbling in German at a speed that made his head spin and jabbing her finger into his chest a couple of times. Ed could definitely tell she was angry—he was bad at picking up signals sometimes, but he wasn't _that_ bad—but he had no idea what he could say that would help her feel better. 

But before he had much chance to say anything else, she was storming out of the room again. Ed looked helplessly after her. Well, so much for getting along. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I've been trying to post new chapters for this every Saturday, but I just couldn't wait to post this new chapter. Consider it a New Year's gift from me—Happy New Year!
> 
> Man, seven thousand words and we didn't even get to see what was going on with 03 Ed! I'm sure you're all anxious to see what's going on with him, but I didn't want to put out an entire novella for this chapter, haha. But I seem to be managing to keep up with a weekly schedule so far, so the next chapter should be here next Saturday. You'll get to see 03 Ed then, I promise!


	4. Something New, Something Strange

Apparently, Al was kind of important in this world for some reason. So far, Ed counted that Winry had been transferred to three different people who all assured her that they would connect her to "young master Alphonse" as soon as possible. The entire thing baffled Ed. Were these servants of some sort? Why would Al even have servants, anyway? Eventually though, someone did manage to connect them to Al, and a worried but groggy voice came through the speaker. 

"Winry? What's wrong?" 

The voice was so achingly familiar that Ed's fingers tightened against the phone box. He and Winry had the receiver between the two of them, both leaning their heads together so they could hear. 

"I'm sorry, Al, I know it's the middle of the night—" Winry started.

"Morning, actually," Al said. Ed frowned at that. That meant that Al was even further away than he had first guessed, somewhere to the east so he would get the sun rising before them. But Resembool was about as far east as you could get before you were out of the country. Was Al in another country? "I'm supposed to be getting up soon anyway. Is something wrong?" 

"Um," Winry looked up at Ed with a frown. "Yes and no. For starters, um. Well... We think Ed had a heart attack." 

"WHAT?!" Al's screech was so loud that both Ed and Winry instinctively flinched away from the speaker. 

"It's okay, Al! He's fine!" Winry said quickly. "We're going to take him to the doctor and get him checked out, but he's okay!" She then nudged Ed with her shoulder and gestured to the phone, and Ed suddenly realized she was encouraging him to say something. 

"Um, yeah, I'm okay," Ed said, reaching up to rub the back of his neck. "Don't worry Al, it's going to take more than that to take me down." 

"Oh my god," Al said, and all the grogginess from before was gone. "This is all my fault, I'm so sorry. I thought it would be better to tell you before you came out here so you and Winry would be prepared, but I should have just waited to tell you in person instead... I... God. Brother, you could have _died_ , and all just because..." Al cut off with a choked sound, and Ed realized he was crying. " _Dammit._ "

Ed's eyes widened. To get Al to the point of swearing must mean it was pretty bad. What exactly had Al and the other Ed been talking about that Al was so worried about? Ed was positively itching with questions, but he had no idea how to ask Al any of them when Winry was sitting right there with them. He couldn't tell Al anything without revealing it to her as well, and he didn't want to do that. 

"It's okay, Al, it's not your fault," Ed said, tightening his fingers against the phone. 

"Okay, but that's not even the reason I called," Winry said with a sigh. "It's important, but Ed's okay, and I wouldn't want to wake you up just to terrify you over something you can't do anything about." 

"There's _more_?" 

"When I came down to the kitchen, Ed was doing _alchemy_." 

Ed resisted the urge to huff at her. He felt almost like he was getting tattled on, like he had some sort of alchemy addiction that needed to be reported on whenever he slipped. Meanwhile, the other side of the phone had gone completely silent. 

"Al, are you still there?" Winry said, leaning her ear closer to the speaker like she would be able to hear Al breathing. Al let out a shaky breath. 

" _H-How_?"

"That was what I was wondering," Winry said, looking up and raising an eyebrow at Ed. "He said the heart attack had rewired his brain." 

"He _what_." 

"Okay, it was just a guess!" Ed snapped. He was feeling like a child who had been dragged into a meeting with his teacher and parents in order to talk about his "behavior problems."

"That's a terrible guess, Brother," Al said in a flat tone. "So what's the real guess that you don't want to tell us?" 

Ed licked his lips, looking away from the phone to look at Winry. She was frowning at him like she could figure out what was going on just by looking at him. Ed sighed and hung his head. 

"Could I... talk to Al alone, please, Winry?" Ed's voice was soft, but silence fell over the three of them as soon as he said it. Winry looked at Ed for a long minute, licking her lips and frowning. 

"Sure. Of course," she eventually murmured, handing the phone over to Ed. He opened his mouth to say something to her, but before he could even figure out what he would say, she was already out of the room. Ed groaned and punched the air. He had gone and messed up again and managed to hurt her feelings like he always had. How was he going to keep up the husband illusion at this rate? 

"What the heck is going on?" Al said. Ed sighed. He would just have to deal with Winry later. 

"Al, I think I'm from a parallel universe." 

A long moment of silence stretched over the two of them, and the longer the moment went, the more Ed felt like all his hopes were suddenly shattering. It wasn't the sort of silence that meant Al was just trying to process something before he spoke. This was the sort of silence that was uncomfortable and awkward, like Al was trying to figure out what to say that wouldn't upset Ed further. But this was _Al_! Al was supposed to understand anything Ed could throw at him. Al wasn't supposed to just sit here in silence like this. Eventually, there was a soft sigh from Al's side of the phone. 

"Brother, you just had a heart attack," Al said, and Ed nearly screamed. 

"No! No, this is not how this is supposed to go!" Ed snapped at the phone. "You're supposed to listen and tell me some idea of what I should do!"

"What you _should_ do is go to the doctor like Winry wants—"

"Look, if I'm not from an alternate dimension, then how come I can do alchemy?"

There was another long, silent pause, and Ed bit his tongue to resist the urge to say "I told you so." He was supposed to be an adult by now, and dammit, he could actually act like that if he tried. 

"Okay," Al said, taking a deep breath. "Okay. So how do you know you're from another world?" 

"Well, I can remember it, for one," Ed said with a snort and a roll of his eyes. "I have a brain full of another language and rocket blueprints that are useless in this world. For two, I can do alchemy. I don't know what your guy did to make it so he couldn't do that anymore, but whatever he did doesn't apply to me. And for three, this has happened to me before."

"Wait, but..." Al groaned, and Ed could almost hear the gears in Al's brain turning. After a long minute, Al sighed. "You're... serious, aren't you?"

" _Why_ wouldn't I be serious about something like this?" Ed hissed at the phone. 

"Okay, okay," Al said with a sigh. "I'm coming out there. I know you and Winry were going to come out for your birthday, but I don't think you should be traveling right now. Mei and I will come out to you instead. Can you handle waiting for that?" 

"Just how far away are you?" Ed frowned at the phone. 

"Brother... Please, just... Go to the doctor like Winry wants you to. You're worrying me." 

Ed groaned and ran a hand through his hair. "Ugh, Al—!"

"I can call you before we set out tonight, okay? I'm going to have to make a lot of preparations, though." 

"Yeah, okay, fine." Ed groaned, rubbing at his forehead. Maybe if he had a day to think on it, he would be better able to explain things to Al. After all, this was supposed to be Al, of all people. He was supposed to understand what Ed was getting at no matter what. The problem had to be that Ed just wasn't explaining it properly. That had to be it. If he just figured out how to explain it better, then Al would actually understand. 

"I love you, Brother," Al said softly. "Please take care of yourself and stay safe." 

"I'll do my best," Ed said with a snort. He certainly always _tried_ to stay safe, it was just the trouble always found him anyway. And somehow he was the one who ended up getting blamed for being reckless. "Love ya too." 

Ed hung up the phone with a soft click, wondering what he was going to do next. Here he had been so sure that calling Al would fix everything, that he would know what to do if he just had Al on his side. And now he somehow felt even more lost than he had before calling Al. What was he going to? He wasn't even able to get tips and tricks from Al on what he was supposed to be doing in this world or how he could better blend in. He didn't even theoretically know where Al was traveling from that was so far away they had a time difference. 

But as Ed sat and thought, he realized he could hear a soft noise coming from somewhere else in the house. Was that... Winry? Ed frowned and followed the sound until he was back at her bedroom— _their_ bedroom—and he could hear crying coming from behind the door. 

"Winry?" he said, slowly pushing the door open and peeking in. Winry wiped at her eyes with the backs of her hands, sniffling as she looked up at him. Ed took small steps towards her, feeling unsure what he was supposed to do. But if the two of them were theoretically married, that meant that the other Ed had to usually be comforting her during moments like this instead of just tucking his tail and running. Which was what Ed _wanted_ to do, what he normally did. But he had to somehow be better than that this time. 

"Um," Ed sat down on the bed next to her and put a hand on her shoulder. "What's wrong, Winry?"

"What's wrong?" Winry repeated, her sobs turning slightly hysterical. Ed winced. Okay, maybe not the right move, then. "What's wrong is that I thought we were past this by now!" 

"Past... What, exactly?"

Winry groaned and gestured her hands towards Ed. " _This_! You and Al and you secret discussions and your alchemy weirdness and you never ever telling me _anything_ and leaving me behind—!"

Ed felt like his heart was breaking just hearing her say it. Sure, she wasn't the Winry from his world, but that was exactly what he had done to her, wasn't it? The biggest thing she and his Winry had in common was the fact that he'd always left her behind. Ed reached out and grabbed her hands. Winry looked up at him with watery eyes, expecting him to say something, but Ed couldn't think of anything that seemed good enough for a moment like this.

"You're right," he whispered, looking up and connecting his eyes with hers. "You're right, I've been leaving you out of things and relying on old habits, and you don't deserve that." 

"I just want to be a team, Ed," Winry said, reaching her hand out and touching his cheek. "And I will love and support you _no matter what_. But I can't do that if you don't let me in." 

Ed swallowed and nodded at her. He was almost half-tempted to throw hypothetical situations at her where she wouldn't support him, because it seemed that unbelievable to him. But he also knew he couldn't do that and hurt her even further by showing that he didn't actually believe her. Unable to think of words, he just settled for leaning in and giving her a tight hug. Winry was immediately hugging him back, burying her face against his chest. 

"Since when did I get taller than you, anyway?" Ed said, feeling his chin come to rest naturally on top of her head. Winry let out a wet chuckle. 

"Ugh, I know, right? So unfair." 

Ed snorted. "You'd better be careful, or I'll revoke your hug privileges." 

"Noooo," Winry protested with a chuckle, burying her face deeper against him and squeezing her arms around him a little tighter. Ed chuckled. 

He meant it when he said she was right. She really was. She didn't deserve to have her supposed husband keeping secrets and dancing circles around her. The thought terrified him to his very core, but she deserved to know something. She deserved to at least be given the chance to prove she really would support him no matter what. 

"Okay, Win," he said, pulling away from her slightly and looking her in the eyes. "Let me explain what's happening."

Winry blinked at him and then flicked a stray tear out of her eye. "Okay...?" 

"Okay, um." Ed frowned and twisted his hands together. "Do you know what a parallel world is?"

"Um..."

"Right," Ed sighed. "So... Uh... What's an important... Okay, remember when I chose to be a State Alchemist?" 

"Of course," Winry said with a smile and snort. 

"Okay, but there were several different choices that could have happened there. I could have just chosen to be happy with what I had. Or I could have chosen to take longer recovering from my automail instead of immediately rushing in." 

"Right..." Winry was looking at him like she was lost on how exactly this even connected to anything. 

"Okay, so... When people picture those other choices, they sometimes just picture them disappearing into nothing. But what if they didn't disappear? What if time and space were so fluid that all these different realities could exist simultaneously? Like, when you make a choice, you're not actually making a choice, because all the possible choices in the entire universe are happening at once, and have already have happened-"

Winry chuckled, and Ed looked at her with wide eyes. "I have no idea what you're talking about, but it's adorable when you get into hardcore scientist mode." 

"Win!" Ed groaned. "Okay, too cerebral. Just picture this then. For every choice you've ever made, picture that there's another world out there where you made the choice one of the other ways. Just... Imagine infinite Winrys out there. Sometimes you two would have almost everything in common except maybe... I dunno, maybe she wears her hair like Hawkeye. But other times maybe things would be so different that you would even wonder what you had in common." 

"Okay," Winry said, raising an eyebrow. "Are you going somewhere with this?" 

"Does it make sense so far?" 

"Yeah, yeah," Winry sighed. "All the choices could lead to a whole different world and the Winry in one of those worlds is totally different. What does that have to do with—"

"I'm one of those other Eds," Ed jumped in before she could finish her sentence. "I'm not from this world, Winry." 

Winry stared at him for a long minute, swallowing wordlessly and looking him over. "What do you mean? Because you're still wearing the same clothes..."

"It's still your Ed's body. It's just my mind that's different. It's like I'm just... him instead of... him being him." 

"Well, where did _he_ go?"

Ed hung his head and looked at the bedspread. "I don't know." 

A long minute of silence passed between the two of them. Trying to think about where the other Ed had gone to was definitely something Ed didn't want to dwell on. He hadn't really wanted to think about it the last time he had landed in another Ed's body either. 

"Well, how do know you're _not_ my Ed?" Winry said, and Ed couldn't bear to bring his eyes up to look at her. "If you had a heart attack, maybe something went wrong in your brain— Wait, hang on, did you actually have a heart attack?"

"The stuff about feeling dizzy and stuff actually happened to me, it just happened in my world. So if you think I had a heart attack, that's probably what happened," Ed said with a sigh. Finally, he dragged his gaze up to actually look at her. "I'm sure I'm not the Ed from here, Winry. I can remember a whole other language that doesn't even exist here. I'm pretty sure my brain wouldn't just make that up because it was having a bad day." 

"Well..." Winry hummed. "You'd be surprised what brains can do, actually." 

"Are you saying you don't believe me?" 

Their eyes connected for a long minute, without needing any words to be spoken. Eventually, Winry broke the connection with a sigh, glancing down at the bedspread and twisting her fingers together. 

"No... I think I _do_ believe you."

Ed nearly jumped out of his skin in surprise. "What? You do?" 

"Something about you has been... just slightly off ever since I brought you home from the cemetery. I could tell it wasn't just you being upset, it was like... I don't know, like everything was just a degree or two off from where it was supposed to be."

Ed just gaped at Winry. Here he had been afraid he would break her heart, and yet she was somehow handling this news better than Al had. She wasn't just shutting off her emotions from shock, was she? Well, if she was, it wasn't unexpected. It had taken Ed a while to adjust when he had first realized he was stuck in the other world with his dad.

"Winry," he said, taking her hands and holding them again. "It's okay if you're upset or mad at me, or if you don't believe me or something." 

Winry gave him a small smile. "You said these worlds happen from all the different choices that we could have made at one point, right?"

"Well, _sort_ of, but..." 

"Well, wouldn't that mean that at one point, you and the Ed I've known were the same Ed?" 

Ed stared at her, unbelieving. No wonder his double had married her. She was absolutely freaking incredible, to be given information like this and somehow take it without even flinching. "Well, sort of. But also like... all time exists at once." 

"So you're still both connected to the greater Ed, then." 

Ed frowned and thought on the idea. "I mean... kind of. It's also sort of nothing like that at all, but... Sort of, yeah."

"Well, I love _all_ of you, then," Winry said with a shrug. "I love the greater Ed. I would love every single one of your lives." 

"Don't say that!" Ed said, choking. "There's literally _infinite_ potential universes, Winry! What if there was... I dunno, like, a universe where I'd murdered you or something?"

"That would have to be a pretty terrible world with terrible circumstances," Winry said, frowning at him. She then squeezed his hands. "I'd feel terrible for you, but you'd still be Ed underneath it all. So I would still love you." 

Ed just stared at Winry for a minute. She wasn't actually understanding what she was saying. She had to just be repeating the sort of romantic stuff that was in novels. She was just responding out of shock, or tiredness, or... something. Because there was no way that Winry would just accept all of this that easily when Al had practically brushed him off. 

"Geez, you're really taking this better than Al," Ed muttered. "You sure you're not in shock or something?" 

"Why, how did Al react?" 

Ed sighed, rubbing the back of his neck with his right hand. He shivered when he realized he could feel the sweat that was beading on the back of his neck. Oh, right, he had an arm. Weird. He flicked his eyes up to the ceiling as he spoke. 

"He said I needed to please, please see the doctor because the heart attack must have gotten me all confused. And then he said he was going to come out here and he'd call before he left tonight. I don't even know where he's coming from in the first place!" 

"Xing," Winry said with a sigh, moving her hands from his and holding his arms instead. Ed turned from looking at the ceiling to look at her. 

"Xing?" he whispered, tears springing to his eyes. " _Why_ is he in Xing? Does he hate me or something in this world?"

"No, no," Winry said with a small laugh and shake of her head. "Oh, Ed, no. He just fell in love with a Xingese princess." 

Ed blinked as he processed that little nugget of information. Well, that would explain the phone getting passed around between servants and such. And if anyone was suited to be trained in a million and one rules of etiquette as a condition of their marriage, well, Al was probably the best candidate possible. "Oh." 

"We should probably go to bed though," Winry said with a sigh, glancing over at the small clock on the nightstand. "I mean, the kids will probably be waking us up in three hours or so, and even if we want to stay up all night asking each other questions—"

The thought of staying up all night definitely sounded exhausting, and Ed sighed. They would definitely need coffee if they were going to do something like that. At the thought of coffee though, his face suddenly brightened. "Oh! I don't have to do weird deals working with Fritz just to get coffee anymore! I can have as much as I want again!" 

"Oh, no, mister!" Winry snapped, shaking her finger at him. "You just had a heart attack, you are absolutely not having anything with caffeine until further notice!" 

"What?! But we don't even know if this body had a heart attack! What if that only happened in my world?"

"What if that happened because you were drinking way too much coffee?" Winry said, shaking her finger at him. "No. You would do better to just try and get as much sleep as possible." 

Ed glanced down at the bed, the _one_ bed in the room and let out a weak chuckle. Admittedly, the thought of staying up all night sounded way more preferable to him. He and Al did it all the time when they were discussing some theory or just got caught up in conversation. Apparently, Winry was more responsible than him and Al, though. No surprise there, really. She looked at Ed in confusion for a moment, her eyes flicking down to the bed and then up to him again. Ed could see the moment when it clicked for her, and her face suddenly softened. 

"I could set you up in Al's room, if you would prefer," she said softly.

"I..." Ed's voice croaked as he looked up at her. "I don't really want to be alone."

"I'm not forbidding you from the bed, Edward."

"I know, but..." Ed frowned and licked his lips. "I mean, you're _married_. Wouldn't your husband... _your_ Ed, wouldn't he be mad?"

"Mad about what?" Winry said, raising an eyebrow. "Last I checked, sharing a bed doesn't automatically mean sex." 

Ed choked at that, a blush creeping up his neck. "No, I wasn't thinking about-!"

"Relax, Ed," Winry said with a roll of her eyes. "If it were Al having nightmares and I shared a bed with him to calm him down, would you think I was cheating on you? Or that Al was betraying you?" 

"Well, no, but-"

"Well," Winry said with a sigh. "Why can you be more forgiving to Al than you can be to yourself?"

Ed opened his mouth to protest, but then shut it again, at a loss for words. Of course he was easier on Al than himself. Al wasn't the one who had— Al deserved that kindness after— Al was better, so— 

"You can sleep wherever you want," Winry sighed. "You can even stay up all night if you prefer. But I'm going to have to deal with kids and appointments and a million other things in the morning, so I'm getting in some sleep while I still can. I think questions can wait a few hours." 

Ed bit his lip and looked at her, then at the bed, then back to her. "Only if you're absolutely sure." 

"Of course I'm sure," Winry said with a smile as she reached out and touched his knee. "Just because you're from another world doesn't mean you should have to go through any of this alone."

She got up then and moved over to the other side of the bed, which Ed used as a chance to wipe away the tears at the corners of his eyes when she wasn't looking. Her acceptance of him came so readily, so easily, and he wondered what he could have ever done to deserve her. Well, _he_ hadn't done anything to deserve her, he supposed, that was the work of his double. 

"Oh, yeah," Winry said with a sigh as she slid her legs under the blankets. "There's an alarm clock on your nightstand, think you could pass that over to me? You're officially off morning duty." 

Ed grabbed the windup clock from his side of the bed and passed it to Winry's outstretched hand, before sliding under the blankets himself. Winry flicked the light off, and Ed found himself laying there in the darkness, wondering what he was supposed to do next. It almost seemed weird that he had so badly wanted to avoid being alone if he was just going to stay on his edge of the bed and try not to touch her at all, but also touching her seemed like Too Much. God, was every night going to be like this? Ed sighed. 

And then in the dark under the sheets, a hand found him, Winry lacing her fingers through his. 

"Goodnight, Ed," she said, squeezing his hand. Ed sighed in relief and squeezed her hand back. He could do hand-holding. That was something innocent, something that wasn't threatening. 

"Night, Win." 

The next moment Ed was aware, he was in Noah's room. Wait, had this been where he was? Ed frowned, trying to place things. He felt like there was something important he wasn't remembering. But he was cut off from his thoughts by the sudden feeling of Noah's lips pressed against him, and any thoughts he'd been trying to pin down melted away as he leaned into her with a groan. God, yes, _this._ This was exactly what he'd been wanting. Why hadn't he just been letting himself have this?

Noah's hands were pulling at the buttons on his shirt, fumbling to open it enough to press her warm hands against his bare chest, and he was whispering her name. He had missed her so much. 

Wait, but how could you miss someone who was always there, though?

"What's hiding inside you, Edward Elric?" Noah said, her fingers pausing on his chest. Ed frowned, confused, and was just about to ask her what she meant when she suddenly dug her fingers into him, disappearing under his skin for a minute before she suddenly ripped his chest open. 

"No, wait, Noah, don't—!" Ed was screaming the minute he felt her nails dig against him, but it was too late. He didn't feel any pain, just a giant empty hole where his heart was supposed to be, and then a thick green smoke was suddenly pouring out from his chest. The instant Noah inhaled it, she was backing away from him, coughing and trying to wave the smoke away. Ed cursed and tried to push the edges of the hole back together, but it seemed like no matter what he did, green smoke kept spilling through his fingers. 

And then, right before his eyes, Noah was coughing and hacking even harder until it seemed to shake her apart into a million pieces, shattering and then blowing away as dust in the wind. 

Ed looked in horror at the spot where Noah had been standing just a minute before, still desperately trying to staunch the flow of the smoke. Why wasn't the weird poisonous gas affecting him like it had affected her? 

"Brother, what's going on?" 

But before Ed could scream for Al to get away, to run, to be anywhere but here... Al was opening the door, the green smoke rushing to meet him. Al coughed and clutched at his throat, still moving forward, still reaching for Ed, still moving even deeper and deeper into the toxic smoke. 

"No, Al, you have to get away!" Ed screamed, backing up as Al reached for him. But even as Al reached for him, Ed could see Al's fingers beginning to turn to dust. Ed screamed and pushed Al out of the way, lunging for the door and running out into the town square, where of course the first person he ran into was his mother. Ed choked and turned in another direction. 

"Brother, come back!" Al's voice was behind him, just like it had been when he'd heard those words last time. "You can't go! I just got you back!"

But Ed didn't even manage to get far before he bumped into Winry. 

"Why are you doing this, Edward?" she snapped at him. 

"I don't mean to!" he screamed, dropping to the pavement and pressing his hands to his forehead. "I can't make it stop! Just get away from me!" 

"You can't go! I just got you back!" 

"You're just like your father, aren't you?

"I'm in love with you, Edward." 

And then, amidst the cacophony of voices and green smoke, Winry's voice was beside him again, this time with a calm and steady voice. "Ed, you need to breathe." 

"I can't," he said, his words getting choked in the back of his throat. He squeezed his eyes shut so all he could see was black. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry." 

And then there were hands against his face. They felt so soft and soothing he wanted to cry. But how could Winry hold his face when there was that awful green smoke everywhere? She wasn't safe here, not when he was— 

"It's okay," Winry whispered. "It's okay. Breathe, Ed."

Something about the way her hands pressed against his skin felt different than everything else going on, like she was the only real thing in the world. Ed cracked his eyes open, and found himself back in the bed with Winry, her worried blue eyes looking straight at him. No green smoke. No hole in his chest. Dream. It was just a dream. Just a dream. 

"You okay?"

"Yeah," Ed said, taking in a deep breath. "Yeah. Thanks, Winry." 

"Do you want to talk about it?" 

Ed winced. "Not really."

"Well, do you want a hug?" Winry said, holding her arms open to him. Ed considered it for a minute. Yes, he absolutely wanted a hug, but was that even proper, or— Ed shook his head. He didn't have the energy to care about that anymore. Winry was right there with a hug, and goddammit, he needed it. 

"Yeah," he whispered, scooting himself over on the bed until Winry could wrap her arms around him. He took in a couple of deep breaths and then closed his eyes, letting himself fall asleep to the sound of her heartbeat and slow breathing.

When Ed woke up again, he was alone in the bed, and he had to take a minute just to remember why it didn't look like his bed in Germany. But the delighted squeals of children from downstairs helped him to remember. Winry _had_ mentioned something about children, hadn't she? Ed sighed and rubbed at his face with his right hand. Oh, right, he had a hand. Weird. He sighed and pulled himself out of the bed, dragging himself down in the direction the sound was coming from.

Winry was in the kitchen, poking at a skillet. She had somehow already gotten ready for the day, her hair neatly pulled back, wearing a pair of tan slacks and a blue polo shirt. Ed gaped at her, wondering how she could already be this awake. He didn't even know how he would manage to look like a functional person, let alone looking as pulled together as Winry did.

"Oh! Good morning!" Winry said, noticing him when she turned slightly. "I hope we didn't wake you!"

"Daddy!" came a squeal from behind Winry, and the next thing Ed knew, Teddy had launched himself at Ed, wrapping around Ed's legs like a barnacle. "Mommy's making pancakes!"

"Hey, sweetie, what did I say about giving Daddy a little space today?" Winry said. Teddy let out a huge sigh, his lower lip trembling.

"Nah, Winry, it's fine," Ed murmured, reaching down and picking up the toddler. Winry smiled and raised an eyebrow at Ed as he settled the triumphant Teddy against his hip, her eyes dancing with unsaid questions.

"You like pancakes, right?"

"Daddy _loves_ pancakes!" Teddy said, and Ed laughed, the sound bubbling out of him. Something about Teddy's face was so oddly familiar, the little furrowed eyebrows, the pout, and the flashing golden eyes. And all just over questioning the validity of pancakes. Ed hadn't thought he would get delighted to see so much of himself in one of his children, but there was something adorable about it. When he looked at Teddy and saw a little bit of himself looking back, he could understand a little bit of why everyone insisted he wasn't such a horrible person. Because this innocent (albeit angry) toddler certainly couldn't be a horrible person.

"Yeah, Winry, of course I love pancakes!" Ed said. Teddy beamed at her in vindication. Winry laughed and shook her head at the two of them as she flipped the pancake. The smell of butter hit Ed's nose as she did it, and he groaned. "God, I can't wait for those to be done."

"There's a whole stack already done," Winry said with a grin, gesturing to a plate behind her. "If you help Teddy and Zaza with theirs, then you guys could start eating while I finish the rest of these."

"Oh, yeah, sure," Ed said with a shrug, earning a cheer from Teddy. A cheer which happened to be right next to his ear, making Ed wince before booping Teddy on the nose. "You know, kid, you're adorable, but you are _way_ too loud for first thing in the morning."

"I can be even _louder_!"

"Don't," Winry and Ed said in unison, their voices somehow flat and panicked at the same time.

Ed put Teddy down and went to go get plates from the same cabinet he had always remembered them being in. Except when he opened the door, it was a bunch of serving bowls and pitchers.

"Oh, right," Winry said, noticing him pausing. "They're in the third cabinet now."

"Right," Ed murmured, closing the first cabinet and moving to the one Winry had directed him to. It was just another reminder that this world was different and not quite his. Teddy didn't seem to notice or care about any of this, chattering excitedly about how he was so hungry, he was pretty sure he could ear four—no, _five—_ pancakes.

Clinging to Winry's leg was another toddler, younger than Teddy, dressed in pigtails and sucking her thumb as she watched the chaos in the kitchen with wide eyes. Ed crouched down so he would be closer to her height, holding a stack of plates.

"Zaza? Do you want pancakes?"

The little blond girl looked up to Winry for confirmation, and Winry chuckled and nodded. When Zaza turned back to Ed, she had a big grin on her face. Ed grinned back at her, their relation to one another crystal clear with the same matching grin on their faces.

Ed took her tiny hand in his and led her to the dining table, Teddy close behind. There was a dog sleeping under the table, and Ed froze when he realized it wasn't Den, but instead a long-haired collie, its red fur fanning out and the dogs head tucked against their paws. Of course it wasn't Den. She'd been an older dog as it was, plus the automail hadn't been easy on her. Of course she hadn't managed to hold on that long. Ed shook his head and tried not to think about it. He had to be normal for the kids, after all. Once Ed had helped Zaza into her chair and put the plates around the table, he was going back to the kitchen to grab the pancakes and syrup.

"Is Zaza short for something, or is there another story behind that?" Ed murmured in a low tone in Winry's ear as he grabbed the pancakes. He was aware that the kids probably weren't paying attention to him, but he still didn't want them to catch on to the fact that he'd forgotten basic things about them.

"Azami," Winry said with a smile, patting his shoulder. "She's named after your grandmother."

Ed blinked. "I didn't know I had one."

"Everyone has at least two, Edward."

"Yeah, but..." Ed sighed and rolled his eyes. If she was telling him that Zaza was named after his grandmother, then she knew full well that he didn't know much about his family tree. She was just messing with him. As he grabbed the syrup, his eyes fell on the coffee press. "Hey, Winry, would I be allowed to have coffee if I transmuted the caffeine out of it?"

"You can't do that with the kids around," Winry sighed, giving him a playful smack on his shoulder. "Teddy will be absolutely obsessed and wanting you to do it all the time. And I don't want to then have to turn around and break his heart when I have to figure out how to explain that daddy can't do alchemy again when you switch back."

Ed sighed and looked from Winry back to the coffee press, licking his lips. "But... coffee..."

"I'll make you some decaf coffee myself," Winry said, pushing him out of the kitchen. "Now please, go feed them before they start eating each other." Sure enough, Teddy was slowly getting louder and louder, like a chaos tornado. Ed supposed he shouldn't have expected anything else from kids with his genetics. 

"Alright!" Ed said, going out to the table with a tall stack of pancakes. "Who wants a pancake?"

Teddy screamed and waved his hands like he was trying to land an airplane instead of pancakes. Ed chuckled and shook his head before putting a pancake on Teddy's plate.

"More, Daddy! More! I'm really hungry!" Teddy said, patting his hands on his little rounded belly. Ed snorted and put another pancake on the kid's plate. Teddy was nodding and immediately reaching for the butter as Ed was turning to put a pancake on Zaza's plate.

"You got that, buddy?"

"Yeah, I got it," Teddy said, staring at the butter with wide eyes as he brought it over to his plate. Utter and complete concentration.

"Okay," Ed said, looking at the pancake on Zaza's plate. "Um... Do you need me to cut this up for you, or something?"

Zaza was looking between him and the pancakes pretty helplessly, so Ed figured that meant yes, he did need to help. Kids this little couldn't handle doing that themselves, right? Ed sighed and started cutting the pancakes into smaller pieces. He had only managed to cut up one piece when Zaza suddenly burst into tears, making a grabbing motion with both her hands towards the pancakes.

"I know, I know, I'm cutting as fast as I can!" Ed said, biting his lip.

He was distracted from the cutting by a loud clatter from behind him, followed by a sheepish, "Oops."

Ed spun to see what had happened. So maybe he didn't know a bunch about kids, but he _did_ know that nothing good happened when a little kid said oops like that. "What happened, Teddy?"

"I dropped the syrup."

Ed was just barely turning to figure out what he was going to need to clean up, but he turned at the same time Winry came to the table, a fresh stack of pancakes in one hand and a hot cup of coffee in the other. She immediately set them down in front of Ed and lunged for the syrup bottle that was still laying on its side in the middle of the table, the syrup slowly pooling out onto the table cloth. Teddy had just been looking at it helplessly without moving to do anything.

"Teddy, you need to _pick things up_ when something like that happens," Winry said with a sigh, then glanced over to Ed, who was still cutting away at Zaza's pancake, even as she screamed louder at him. "Oh, Ed, are you cutting that into triangles?"

"What?" Ed blinked and looked over at Winry. She came over and looked at the pancake, shaking her head.

"Yeah, she doesn't eat square pancakes, only triangle ones," Winry said, grabbing the plate and trading it with the empty plate in front of her seat. She immediately plopped a pancake on the new plate, plucked the fork and knife from Ed's hands, and began cutting the pancake into triangles in one fluid motion. "It's okay, honey, see? New pancake. No more squares."

Ed sighed and sat in his seat, reaching out to grab the cup of coffee. Next to the coffee was the butter, which Ed noted was suddenly a complete disaster. It had been transformed into a mangled mess with pancake crumbs suddenly worked into the very essence of the butter. When he looked up, he realized that Teddy's pancakes were pretty much equally mangled. Alright. Ed made a note to his future self to not trust the toddler when he said he could handle something. He sighed and took a sip of the coffee.

And then practically choked as the taste suddenly hit his mouth. He coughed and looked down at the mug with a scowl like it had betrayed him. "God, I don't remember the coffee here tasting that bad." 

"We're a landlocked country that was always at war," Winry said with a laugh and shake of her head as she kept cutting Zaza's pancake. "No one sends us the _good_ beans." 

"Right," Ed said with a deep sigh. He decided not to comment on how it wasn't just the beans, but the coffee was also more watered down than he was used to, probably in an attempt to save money. Darn it all, universe. Here he had spent so long learning that equivalent exchange didn't truly exist, and yet it felt like sometimes life smacked him over the head with it. You can have decent quality beans, but they cost a fortune and you have to do work under the table to get them. Or you can have plentiful coffee that tastes terrible. Was one of those options even actually better than the other one?

"There's not much point to it if it's decaf _and_ tastes terrible," Ed muttered with a pout. "It's just... the coffee version of Mustang. Absolutely useless."

Winry had only managed to finish cutting Zaza's pancake when the phone suddenly rang, making her jump up and run to the other room to answer it. Ed was about to grab the fork and knife so he could feed Zaza, but before he had a chance to react, she was reaching forward, grabbing a piece of triangle pancake and popping it in her mouth on her own. She wasn't even actually his kid and somehow Ed still felt a surge of pride at her taking care of herself. And also relief. He had been hoping for a chance to actually eat some of those pancakes. He slid a couple pancakes onto his plate, spreading some of the mangled butter on them. 

God, fresh Resembool butter. Ed closed his eyes and took in a deep breath so he could fully smell it. He had missed that so much. He decided to take another couple slices of butter for his pancakes. 

"Well, good news," Winry said, coming back into the room with a sigh. "Dr. Williams said he was willing to come all the way out here so he could do a little check up on you. There's another doctor from the military coming out from Central, but he's going to take a week to get here." 

"Yippee," Ed said in a deadpan voice. 

"Ed! It's important! You have to—" 

"I'm all done! Can I go play?" 

"Well, sure, but," Winry sighed as she turned and saw that Teddy's plate still had half his pancakes left. "Teddy, you haven't even finished your food!"

"I'm full!" Teddy called back to her, already running off to go play. Winry sighed again, rubbing her forehead as she turned to Ed. 

"Anyway, I only had a couple of appointments today, but when I called and told them what was going on, they were more than happy to reschedule. So it looks like I have a rare day off. I still have a couple more phone calls to make, but I thought after that—" She was interrupted by a squeal from Zaza, so Winry got out of her seat. As soon as she grabbed Zaza, the toddler stopped crying, settling her head against Winry and closing her eyes. "I thought after that we could set the kids up with some of their toys and we could actually ask some of those questions we wanted to ask one another last night." 

Ed gave her a weak smile. He couldn't say he wasn't nervous at the thought of answering her questions, but he also had a ton of questions of his own to ask her. 

Everything about this world felt so... normal. Well, at least the parts he had experienced so far. Even dealing with him being from another world was just something that got wiggled into the schedule around pancakes and play time. Normally he would have been scared that a life like this would feel boring, that he wouldn't want anything to do with a life that was mostly mundanities, but there was a certain comfort to the entire thing. It was almost easy to forget that he didn't belong here, that he needed to find a way to get home, to get back to Al, that he didn't have any right to any of this.

But it was still so tempting to think about if he could just be the Ed who was actually supposed to be here, the one who knew to cut pancakes into triangles and not squares. He wanted to know more about how his alternate self had managed to get a life like this. Maybe if he knew the trick, he could actually figure out how to do something similar for himself. Even if the back of his mind still kept worrying that the other shoe would drop any minute now and rip away the easy comfort. 

He was snapped out of his thoughts by the sound of the phone ringing. 

"It just never stops, huh?" Ed said. Winry stood up, moving to push Zaza into his arms instead, but Ed waved her off. Zaza looked too comfortable in Winry's arms to be disturbed. "No, Winry, it's fine, I got it." 

"Are you sure? What if—" 

"Then I'll just hold the phone up to your ear," Ed said, already moving to the other room and putting his hand on the receiver. "Hello?" 

"Fullmetal?" 

Ed felt the blood drain from his face at the familiar voice. How long had it been since he had heard that? Especially with that particular little twinge of irritation that usually meant he had maybe caused just an ounce too much chaos. 

"Oh, hey, Mustang." He tried to make it sound casual, but his voice slid a little on the words. 

"Care to explain why the first thing I see when I come into my office this morning is an order for a doctor to come out to Resembool to check for a potential heart attack?"

"Uh..." As Ed fumbled for words, Winry came in the room, still holding Zaza and watching him with a worried expression. 

"And then I get another order to cancel the escort lined up to get you to Xing because you're..." there was a rustle of papers, "...'not well enough to travel?' And then I just got a call from your brother saying the _emperor_ is going to be taking an unexpected trip to the country in order to check on his friend's health?" 

Ed blinked and stared at the phone. The _emperor_? "Uh..." 

"Mind telling me what's going on? And why everyone on the planet seems to have been told about this before me?" 

"Winry's just worried," Ed said with a cough. She gave him a frown. "Well, okay... She's... _We're_ being extra careful, just in case."

"Hm." A low grunt from Mustang. "Alphonse sure seemed to think it was more than just being extra careful." 

Ed narrowed his eyes at the phone. "Why, what did Al tell you?" 

"What are you _worried_ he might have told me?"

Ed went silent, staring at the phone. He knew he had eventually managed to see his Mustang as an equal and ally. He had really proved that when it came down to it, he wouldn't choose a promotion over Ed. But was that true of this Mustang? If Ed decided to trust him, he could end up with Mustang having control of the strings, just like he'd accidentally done as a child. And what if the Mustang here was nothing like his Mustang?

_"...you'd still be Ed underneath it all. So I would still love you."_

Ed sighed at the memory of Winry the night before, just trusting him despite everything. And besides, she had managed to surprise him with her reaction. Maybe it would be worth it to give trust a try. And besides, Roy was always someone who seemed to have things under control, even when it seemed like they were spinning out of control. 

"Could you call me from an outside line?" 

There was a pause from Mustang's side of the phone. Ed knew it seemed like an overprotective measure, but he couldn't be exactly sure what had happened in this world. What if his double had managed to get Al's body back before he'd found out about Bradley? There was even the chance that Bradley wasn't even a homunculus here. Maybe he was more like Fritz Lang. Or maybe he was even worse. Ed didn't want to risk things getting potentially even worse just by assuming things had gone similarly to his world.

"That serious, huh?" Mustang finally said.

"Yes." 

Another long pause and then a sigh. "Well, now that I'm aware the Emperor is coming to visit you, I need to make sure he'll be greeted with a proper welcome. I'll be at your place tomorrow morning so we can make plans." 

Ed smirked. Good old Mustang, he had always been great with rolling with something and finding ways to say important information in the most innocent of ways. Ed hadn't thought he would miss him all that much, but it felt like four years of wondering what had happened after he'd left in the plane suddenly all caught up with him at once. It was a _relief_ to know that Mustang was on his side, willing to listen, and was going to be there tomorrow morning. 

"Thanks," Ed croaked. 

"Please just make sure you don't have another heart attack or something before I get there," Mustang said. "It would be incredibly annoying if you died before I got there and I did all that traveling for nothing." 

"Sure thing, Colonel Bastard."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like this chapter is somehow every reason why I don't currently have kids and also every reason why I wish I had them. But also every reason why I'm glad I don't. But also... Sigh. I hope I managed to get them mostly right in terms of what they can do at their ages.
> 
> Anyway, I know I listed Ed/Winry and Ed/Noah as main pairings for this story, but sometimes I feel like I've been married so long that I don't really know how to write romance, you know? Especially with me being demisexual myself. I feel more like any kind of romance I write is more like... Best best friends who happen to kiss sometimes. Hopefully it works well for this story since it's meant to be demisexual Ed anyway. 
> 
> Honestly, I kind of wish more people would write more relationships that have already been going for a while. I feel like there's so much emphasis on the beginning-whirlwind-butterflies stage of romance that no one really talks about the point where you're so comfortable with one another that you can tell what your partner is feeling by how they breathe. I wish romance wasn't depicted as just sexual and that excited nervous energy you get at the beginning. I'd love to see more couples who have been married a while, who have that kind of long-term comfortable love. Romance doesn't have to be sexual to be romance. 


	5. Spark

Ed managed to pull himself away from the automail and stood, immediately following Noah into the living room. No. No, he had only just been starting to get along with her, and darn it, he liked her company enough that he wasn't about to let it get ruined again just because of a stupid misunderstanding. 

He reached out for her hand, his fingers catching against hers. As soon as he touched her, Ed tried desperately to remember picking up the journal and then tossing it aside. He didn't know if he could even make sure she picked up on a memory intentionally, but it was the first thought he had. Clearly trying to have both of them stumble through in German and Amestrian hadn't worked so far. 

But as he held her hand, another image flitted through his mind, an image of his face, only he was making a different expression than he was used to seeing in the mirror, softer, maybe even a little nostalgic. And he could feel a deep, warm love for this other him as he leaned forward and... and _kissed_ the other him. 

"Noah..." the other him whispered. 

The thought suddenly stopped as Noah pulled her hand away from him with a gasp, looking at him with a shocked expression. He stared back at her, trying to piece together what had just happened. The other him had said her name, did that mean... Had he just seen one of Noah's memories?

"I-I didn't know you could... do memories the other way," Ed gasped. Noah just stared at him with a shocked expression. Right, she wouldn't be able to understand him if he said that much in Amestrian. He desperately wished he could speak more German, at least enough to ask her why he had suddenly been able to see what seemed like one of her memories. 

"I'm sorry," Ed said, holding his hands up in surrender. It seemed like the safest thing to say, like something she would be likely to understand even with limited Amestrian. She still stared at him with that wide-eyed expression, but Ed could see the tears at the edge of her vision. He suddenly realized she was fighting with everything she had not to cry. Suddenly it made a little more sense why he had been feeling the way he had in her memory. It was because that was how _she'd_ felt in that moment. 

"Oh, Noah," he whispered, taking a step closer to her. "Were you in love with him?" 

The tears did start falling from her eyes then, and when Ed held his arms out to her, she was immediately pressing against him in a tight hug. More memories pressed into his mind, though none as vivid and complete as the kiss memory he'd just seen. It was like he could see brief little glimpses into this life that wasn't quite his. Made even weirder by the fact that he was looking at these memories from an outsider's perspective, so every memory meant he was looking at himself. There was a moment of a warm night and Noah looking over at him as he pointed at the sky. Another moment where someone was yelling at her, and then he was suddenly in front of her, his arms out wide like he was protecting her. Then he was in a machine, strapped in and hurtling towards the sky as she screamed at him. And then a moment of him curled up in a bed, muttering in his sleep, and a heavy pit in the bottom of Noah's stomach as she looked at him. Guilt. So much guilt. So much guilt it was familiar. 

Even if he didn't understand the context of her memories, he could definitely understand the feeling of memories so heavy it felt like you could drown under them. He wrapped his arms around her, giving her a squeeze. He could feel her crying against the skin of his chest. He had been in such a rush after she had stormed out of the room that he hadn't thought about the fact that he still wasn't wearing his shirt after he'd taken it off to inspect his automail.

"It's okay," he murmured. He didn't know if she would be able to understand him, but the words were worth saying anyway. "It's okay. It's not your fault." 

"Ed," Noah hiccuped, her arms squeezing him tighter. 

They stayed like that for a long minute, the room quiet enough that Ed could hear a clock ticking in between Noah's shaky breaths. Apparently, she cried pretty quietly. It would have been hard for him to even know she was crying if not for her shuddering inhales and the feel of wet tears against his skin. But then the quiet moment was interrupted by a light cough. 

"Well, you two certainly learned to get along."

Ed blinked and pulled away from Noah's hug to see Al standing by the front door, looking at them with a raised eyebrow. Ed glanced down at himself, shirtless and hugging Noah despite Al knowing he was married back in his world. He could already feel the blood creeping up his neck at the sudden realization of what the situation could look like.

"Home already?" Ed said with a cough before realizing that only made him look even worse, somehow. "I-I was going to work on fixing this automail, but then Noah was crying, and..." 

"You can fix Brother's automail?" Al said, draping his coat over a chair and looking over at Ed with wide eyes. "Really?" 

"Well," Ed coughed and rubbed the back of his neck, glancing over to Noah. She had pulled away from him and was looking at the floor. "I'm definitely not Winry. I'm not even technically an actual mechanic, but... I think I can manage to rig something together. It should make life easier for the other me when we figure out how to switch back, right?" 

"Absolutely!" Al said with a nod, his eyes bright. He then turned to Noah and said something to her in German. She looked up, turning her attention first to Ed, then to Al before saying something in German in response. She ended whatever she was saying by gesturing towards the stockpot on the stove. 

_„Ah, danke schön, Noah!"_ Al said with a grin before going over to the stove. Ed vaguely remembered Noah teaching him that had meant thank you. 

"Anyway," Ed muttered, looking down at the floor. He scurried off to the bedroom before there could be much chance to protest. He wanted to have a chance to get his damn shirt back on and work on automail and pretend nothing else existed. 

As Ed pulled his shirt back on in the other room, he could hear the clinking of silverware against china and Al cheerfully chatting at Noah in German. Ed found himself amazed at how quickly he was adjusting to the sound of German. The rhythm of it was already familiar to him, like he had been listening to it for years. Sometimes he almost felt like he could just understand if he focused a little harder, like he was trying to remember something from a dream long ago. 

"Alright, let's see how mad Win would be," Ed said with a chuckle to himself as he rolled up his sleeves and reached to pull the battered automail arm out of the wooden crate. 

All things considered, it wasn't actually in as bad of shape as Ed would have expected after years of wear and tear in a world without automail. It seemed like the reason his other self had probably stopped using the arm was because the main central wire had frayed right at the area where it met the port. A common problem for automail that had gone a while without maintenance, really. All Ed would need to do to fix it would be to trim the wire a tiny bit and re-weld it into place. Thank god Winry always managed to put a couple inches of extra wire in for just this problem. It meant Ed could actually fix it without making it so the arm couldn't bend. 

Meanwhile, the outer casing was so battered and beaten that Ed figured it would be easier to just forge a new one instead of trying to hammer it back into shape. Some of the less important wires seemed to be struggling, which led to Ed wondering what technology he would even be able to work with in this world. Which led to him pulling out one of the spare arms he had seen in the closet earlier to see if he could figure out what adaptations had been made. When then led to him realizing he would need actual tools to look inside an arm that wasn't falling apart, which meant tearing the closet apart in the hopes that tools wouldn't be kept too far away from the spare arms and legs. 

When Al finally came into the room, Ed was sitting on the floor with the two different arms, surrounded by a mess of metal parts and tools. At some point, even a ponytail had been too much of a hassle and he had ended up opting for one of Winry's favorite styles instead, a lazy bun half twisted at the nape of his neck. Ed bit his lip as he leaned between the two arms, ticking things off on his fingers and muttering to himself. Al let out a bark of a laugh at the sight, making Ed nearly jump out of his skin in surprise. 

"Sorry," Al said with a chuckle, waving his hand at Ed. "It's just... You looked so much like Winry for a minute." 

Ed felt his heart clench at the words, and he looked down, as if he would be able to see Winry just by looking at himself. As if he could somehow bring her close to him just by being more like her. But, no, it didn't make her suddenly materialize just because he missed her. Big surprise. Ed sighed and looked back to Al. 

"So," Al said, twisting his fingers together and looking a the mess of automail spread across the floor. "Um. Can I help?"

Ed gave Al a weak smirk. "You don't have to invent excuses to hang out with me, you know."

It was weird how this person, this _stranger_ could somehow be Al. He saw so much of his Al looking back at him through this Al's eyes. And yet it was like there was this invisible thread of tension strung between them, tight and heavy in a way he wasn't used to feeling. Somehow he felt like he knew this person better than anyone else in the universe while also feeling simultaneously like a complete stranger. How was that even possible?

"I-I'm not inventing excuses!" Al stammered, his cheeks turning a little pink as he talked. "It's just, you were hidden away in here, and I was worrying about you, and—!"

"What about Noah?" Ed said, cutting Al off. "Is she okay? She seemed kind of... down." 

"Yeah, yeah, she's fine," Al said with a frown as he sat down on the edge of his bed. "She's just... She's got a lot on her mind right now." 

Ed frowned and turned away from the automail so he could look at Al better. "Yeah, that makes sense. I think most people would be if someone possessed the body of the person they're in love with."

Al raised an eyebrow at him. "You... You know she's in love with him?"

"Well, yeah," Ed said with a shrug. "She showed me that memory of her kissing him." 

" _Kissing_?" Al said, his eyebrows somehow managing to find a way to slide even further up his forehead. "She didn't say— Wait. What do you mean she _showed_ you that memory?" 

"She just.. showed me?" Ed said with a frown. "I touched her, and then I was seeing a memory through her eyes."

" _What_?" Al whispered, his eyes wide. "I have to tell Noah!" 

"Hang on, is this _not_ normal?"

"No!" Al said with a sharp shake of his head. "Noah's abilities normally only go one way. She's always been able to see mine and Brother's memories, but we've never been able to see hers. I don't think she even _knew—_ " Al was interrupted out of what he was saying by a soft knock at the door, followed by Noah poking her head in the room and saying something in German. Ed guessed she must have heard Al yell her name twice and thought maybe he had been calling her. 

As Al babbled at Noah in German, Ed sighed and turned his attention back to the automail on the floor in front of him. So far, the biggest potential problem he'd found with this world and automail was that unlike Amestris, they didn't seem to have mastered the ability to turn brain signals into actual energy. Which meant that he was dependent on some sort of outside source to keep the automail actually running. Which also happened to take up a lot of space, which was probably why the modified arm was slower and less versatile. Of course, there was the option of adding an exterior battery pack of some sort, but that meant he would have to carry the battery pack somewhere on himself, and that sounded like more of a hassle than he wanted to deal with. 

"Wait, so," Al suddenly said in Amestrian, snapping Ed out of his thoughts to look up at Al. "Br- _Ed_ , you, um, you said you saw the memory through Noah's eyes and not yours, right?" 

Ed tried to ignore the tiny stab to his heart and nodded. "Yeah, I was looking at me, er, him. The other memories I saw were the same way too." 

"Wait, there were _more_?" 

"Um, yeah," Ed said with a frown, reaching up and scratching at his head with his pointer finger. Al was still leaning forward with wide eyes, so Ed decided to give more information. "There was one where I- _he_ was protecting her at some sort of market. And um... She was yelling at him in a... flying machine or something? And... something with stars, I guess?" 

He purposefully decided to leave out the memory where Noah had been watching the other him sleep. After all, Al had been surprised just to hear that she and his brother had kissed. Ed didn't really want to share more information than Noah wanted Al to know. Whatever had been going on between her and the other Ed was their business. Al turned back to Noah and started babbling more to her in German. Ed tried to pay attention for a minute to see if there would be any more questions for him, but after a minute of them talking in German, he turned his attention back to the automail. 

Only to find MuhMuh batting a screw across the floor. 

"Shit! MooMoo!" Ed snapped, making the cat jump. "I need that, you jerk!" 

MuhMuh pouted for a minute, giving Ed a look like he'd been betrayed. Ed groaned and shooed the cat away from the screw, grabbing it and turning back to the automail. As he did, he realized the other chatter in the room had gone completely silent. Ed frowned and looked up, only to find Noah and Al both staring at him. He blinked. 

"Um. What?" 

"How..." Al frowned and shook his head. "How did you learn that much German in a day?" 

"What're you talking about, Al?"

"What... What you just said. It was all in German." 

"What..." Ed frowned and thought back over what he'd said. He had been so caught up in the emotion that he hadn't really thought about what he was saying. But when he tried to think back on what he'd said, the sounds of the words in his memory sounded different from what he would have expected, and yet somehow slightly out of reach at the same time, like he hadn't been fully listening to his own words as they came out of his mouth. 

"You know," Ed said slowly, frowning and tapping a finger to his chin. "Memories... They're connected to the brain, and that hasn't changed. I wonder if... Maybe this brain remembers German, even if I don't." 

The spark of an idea lit a fire deep inside Ed that he hadn't felt in a long time. It felt like when he had first realized that it _had_ to be possible to get Al's body back. If his brain was able to remember German, then that meant all kinds of other things, like that he was still connected to the other Ed. Maybe their Gates had just been tangled like his and Al's. Then again, would two alternate Eds have two Gates, or one shared Gate? Did he even still have a Gate at all after giving up alchemy? Well, would it be possible for him to even be here without a Gate? Did that mean that his being here was proof that it was possible for him to get his alchemy back? His mind reeled with a million questions just from the one possibility. 

He was suddenly snapped out of his thoughts by the sound of metal rolling against the floor, and looked down to see that MuhMuh had returned to his quest to kill the screw. Ed groaned and shooed the cat away again. 

"You know, maybe it would be easier if we took all of this out to the other room and set it up on the table," Al said with a sigh. "MuhMuh won't mess with it if it means he has to jump up that high." 

"Lazy ass cat," Ed muttered, but still leaned forward and started collecting the various bits and pieces of automail. 

Al and Noah helped him get the automail out to the table, pulling together all the various tools and disconnected pieces of machinery. The two of them ended up sitting at the table with him as he looked over the arms. Ed didn't catch on to everything they were talking about, but he knew there was a lot of discussion over the fact that he had managed to speak German intuitively, plus some more discussion over the fact that he'd seen some of Noah's memories. There was a point where Noah tried with both him and Al to do it again on purpose, frowning in concentration as she tried to share a memory with each of them. After a couple of tries without luck, she gave up and turned on the radio instead. 

"Anyway, then I went and did a transmutation on Envy, and that's how we got out of there," Ed said to Al with a sigh as he turned a wire over in his hands. Noah was at the table with both of them, leaning against Ed's shoulder as he talked. It turned out to just be easier for everyone if she just touched him while he talked about his memories, because she could just experience the memory he was talking about, and Al could clear up anything that she still didn't understand. 

"Well, unfortunately, that's not going to work this time," Al said with a sigh of his own. "That's really interesting though. We used Envy to open the Gate between the two worlds here too." 

"Fate," Ed muttered with a small smirk before frowning at the wire. "Wait, is this a female output? But that doesn't make any sense, I—" 

He was interrupted as the song on the radio changed and Noah suddenly pulled away from his shoulder with a delighted laugh. But then she looked over to Ed, and her face suddenly fell with a sigh. 

"Oh. The Charleston," Al said with a sad smile. Ed gave him a confused frown, so Al added, "Noah and Brother had this tradition where they always dance whenever this song comes on." He then turned to Noah and said something to her in German, making her smile again as she stood up and held out a hand to Al. 

What followed was a dance so ridiculous and joyful that Ed couldn't help but put the automail down and watch Noah and Al dancing together. It almost reminded him of the kind of dance Teddy did whenever he desperately needed to go potty, their legs shaking like gelatin as they walked backward and forward towards one another. Ed felt a delighted laugh bubbled up from the bottom of his throat as he watched them, and he could suddenly understand why his other self would always make a point of doing the dance whenever the song came on. It would be worth it every time just to see that overjoyed smile on Noah's face. 

"Okay, how the hell do you even do that?" Ed said, standing up and stepping away from the table. Al grinned at him. God, that grin. That bright sunshiney grin that Ed had been willing to lay his life down for just for the chance to see it again. And here Al was, just safe and happy and grinning from ear to ear because he was doing a ridiculous dance like any other boy his age. Ed couldn't help but flash a big grin back. 

"It's actually not that hard! You just kind of... Move your knees in and out, and then you just... Walk back and forth."

"What?" Ed laughed and tried moving his knees in and out, but it felt like it was just awkward compared to Al and Noah's movements. 

"Brother's way better at it than me," Al said with a laugh. "But it doesn't really matter how you do it as long as you're having fun." 

Ed laughed and closed his eyes so he wouldn't have to look at his sad attempt at a dance compared to Al and Noah. Losing his visual input made the music feel louder and stronger, and he could almost swear it sounded familiar, like he had once heard it long ago. Maybe it was because his body was remembering something he couldn't. He took in a deep breath and focused on that feeling, trying to let go of himself and let the unfamiliar familiarity wash over him. 

And for a minute, the dance actually felt completely natural, like he really was better at it than Al, like he really had been doing this dance every time the song came on the radio. Ed laughed and opened his eyes, but the second he lost the isolation of darkness, the feeling fell away from him and he tripped over himself, falling on the floor in a tangled heap. 

He could hear the concerned laughs from Noah and Al above him, and he laughed with them, pushing himself back into a standing position right as the song ended and switched to something different. 

"Okay, I think I'm too tired for this. I need to get some sleep," Ed said with a laugh and shake of his head. He had noticed the time slipping away while he had been working on the automail, and even though it was still earlier than he would have preferred, the all-nighter from the day before was still weighing on him. Of course, it wouldn't have felt that early for bed back home, not when he would have had two toddlers to put to bed. The thought hit his heart with a pang. He wondered how they were doing without him around. Was the other him tucking them in bed and making sure they both got a goodnight kiss? 

"Yeah, bed does sound kind of nice," Al said. He turned to Noah and said something in German, to which she nodded. Ed assumed that the consensus was yes, bedtime, because Noah leaned over to the radio and flicked it off. Then the three of them were exchanging good nights in two different languages, and Noah went off to her bedroom while he and Al went off to theirs. He was immediately grateful that they had moved the automail out to the living room, because it meant that the only thing he had to move before collapsing on the bed was the journal Noah had been so mad at him over just a few hours before. After that, he was asleep almost as soon as his head hit the pillow. 

The next moment Ed was aware, he was opening his eyes to an empty white void of space.

* * *

"So, Mustang," Ed said, turning to look at Winry as he hung the receiver back in its cradle. "He's... He's a... good guy in this world... Right?"

Winry let out a small chuckle. "He was a groomsman at our wedding. Ed trusts him." 

It was weird hearing himself referred to in third person like that, but he knew that she meant the other him, the him who would normally be here. 

"Okay, good. Well. He says he's going to be here tomorrow," Ed said with a shrug. "And he said something about an... emperor coming...?"

"Geez. I don't think the embassy will have been this crowded since our wedding," Winry said with a snort and shake of her head. "I guess I need to—" she paused, a stricken look suddenly coming over her face. Ed suddenly found Zaza thrust into his arms and Winry was running off before he could even ask her what was happening. He followed her with a frown, Zaza letting out a small complaint as she readjusted against him. 

"Winry?" he said with a frown, knocking at the closed bathroom door. "You okay?" 

"Yeah," she croaked right before making a retching sound. Ed winced. She didn't _sound_ okay, no matter what she said. "I just... I forgot I can't have dairy first thing in the morning." 

"Yeah, milk is evil like that." Ed snorted. He had experienced the same thing one too many times. He was surprised Winry was even having a reaction like this to milk when she had always been the one pushing him to drink milk anyway. Maybe this world's Winry was different from his Winry and couldn't handle milk, just like him. "You need anything?" 

"No, just..." Winry paused and Ed could hear more sick sounds, his own stomach clenching in sympathy. "Just give me a minute and I'll be out." 

Once Winry actually managed to pull herself out of the bathroom, she snapped back to normal faster than Ed would have expected. It was like the house was a chaotic center of activity, and all he could manage to do was follow along as the world passed by in a bit of a blur. Winry had to make several other calls, flipping between things that needed to be done with a ruthless efficiency that made Ed jealous. First, there was a call to inform someone a shipment she was working on was going to be late, then a call to a neighbor explaining the situation and asking for a babysitter, and then a call to the embassy explaining that they were going to have to prepare for this apparent emperor's arrival. After she had finished with the phone, she moved on to the kids, Ed following in her wake and feeling completely useless. 

But somehow, despite feeling useless, he managed to at least help her get the kids wiggled into some fresh clothes for the day. Then they were handing Teddy and Zaza over to the teen girl who had come over to babysit. Teddy wasn't particularly keen on the idea, but he managed to be convinced when Winry said he would get some special time hanging out with her and daddy after the doctor had come. 

And then finally, _finally_ , there was a moment of peace, the kids playing in another room and the phone silent for the first time all day. It wasn't even lunchtime and Ed already felt ready to collapse from exhaustion. 

"Okay," Winry said, pushing a mug of hot tea in his hands. "We should have a good few hours before Dr. Williams gets here. Questions?" 

"Questions," Ed agreed with a sigh and a nod. He took a long sip as he thought over what he most wanted to know. He had been so preoccupied with everything happening that he hadn't really had much chance to think about what he wanted to ask Winry. "How long have we been married?" 

"Five years," Winry said with a soft smile. Ed tried his best not to gape at her. With how fast his life tended to move, five years of anything staying consistent seemed like an eternity. 

"And... Teddy and Zaza?" 

"Teddy is three, Zaza is two." 

"Huh. I thought two-year-olds talked more than that." 

Winry let out a long sigh, taking a sip of her own tea before speaking again. "Yeah, she's been having trouble with talking. She's just... not really interested. Ed's been trying to work with her on that." 

"Huh." Ed clicked his tongue and took another sip of tea. He could vaguely remember his mom once mentioning that he had struggled with learning to talk at first, but he couldn't remember what she'd said had changed that for him. Had Zaza inherited that from him somehow? He decided to let it go for the moment, though. After all, he wanted to figure out how to actually get home. The _other_ Ed was the one responsible for figuring out how to parent his kids. 

"And how old am I?" 

"Twenty-two," Winry said with a laugh. "Though you turn twenty-three in a couple weeks, and you've been calling yourself twenty-three already. I think you're just trying to steal the thunder from your own birthday so Al and I can't make as big of a fuss over it." 

Ed frowned at her. "A couple weeks? What's today's date?"

"Uh..." Winry tilted her head like she was counting to herself. "Let's see, today's Friday, so... The 20th? Yeah. January 20th." 

Ed nearly choked on his tea. Somehow, even though he was an entire world away, even in a different year, it was still somehow the same exact day it had been back in Germany. January 20th, exactly two weeks before his twenty-third birthday. He wasn't sure why exactly the dates lined up, but something about it seemed significant. 

"Weird," Ed muttered. "It was the 19th yesterday in my world too. I guess your Ed and I have our timelines synced up." 

"Huh. So you two are the exact same age?" 

"Apparently." 

There was a moment of silence between them as they both sipped at their tea before Winry finally broke the silence. "Can I ask you a question?" 

"Like what?" Ed swallowed a lump in his throat, not looking at her. 

"You and your Winry... Did you...?" 

The question hung in the air for a minute as Ed took another gulp of tea, trying to figure out how to answer. Winry didn't want him to hide things from her. She wouldn't have asked if she didn't honestly want to hear the answer. He sighed and looked over to her, squeezing the mug with both his hands. 

"No. I... I haven't seen her in four years." 

"What?" Winry's eyes went wide, her own hands curling around her mug, a million questions flitting through her eyes. Ed sighed, already knowing some of what she wanted to know before she even asked. 

"That's why I know so much about parallel worlds," he said with a sigh. "I ended up getting stuck in a parallel world. I haven't seen home in years." 

"But... What about Al?"

"He and I spent a couple years apart," Ed said, pressing his lips together as he watched her reaction. "But then he ended up eventually figuring out a way to get back to me, so we've been together since then." 

Winry frowned at him, her eyes gaining a sharp edge. "He found a way to you in this other world. But not me?" 

Ed couldn't answer her, not when she was looking at him with those sharp eyes that cut like glass. He didn't even know how to look her in the eyes, not when he knew she was right, not when he knew how much it had to hurt her. She wasn't even the Winry from his world and it was hurting her like this. If it hurt her this much, how much had it hurt his Winry? He closed his eyes, feeling like part of him had shattered and broken deep inside of him. 

"Let me guess," Winry said with a sharp bark of a laugh. "Tell me if this is similar to what happened. Al probably did all sorts of alchemy nonsense to try and bring you back, which probably turned into a big mess like it always does. And then you two were so obsessed with each other and _protecting_ me that you ended up not even including me in the whole adventure, and then Al ran off to follow you and didn't even think to check if I wanted to come along. And maybe he or you or both of you decided you knew better than me what's _best_ for me, and so you just... left me behind, telling yourselves I would be _happier_ that way." 

A long moment of silence passed between them, tight like a string about to snap. Ed kept his eyes closed, sucking in a long breath. 

"Am I _wrong_ , Edward?"

"Winry..." 

"Oh, don't you _'Winry'_ me!" she snapped, setting her mug on the side table with a loud clunk. When Ed was finally brave enough to crack his eyes open and look at her, she was rubbing at her forehead with a deep frown. Her next words were practically a whisper. 

"Did you love her?"

Ed swallowed, tapping his fingers against the mug. "I... I don't know."

" _Bullshit_." Winry snapped her eyes up to look at him, and for a split second, Ed swore he could see a little bit of himself in her. Had she picked up that fierce, hard look from him at some point? Was that just something that happened with marriage, where both people took on bits of the other's traits until they met somewhere in the middle?

"Don't tell me you don't know your feelings, Edward Elric," Winry said in a low tone. Ed sighed and looked down at his tea again. "You absolutely know. You just don't want to face it. _Did you love her_?" 

"Please don't make me say it," Ed whispered, his voice cracking on the words. 

"Did. You. Love. Her?" 

Another long moment of silence passed between them as Ed pressed his lips together and tried to swallow the lump in his throat. 

"Ed." 

"Yes, okay?!" he snapped, jumping to his feet, the words ripping out of his throat with a half-strangled scream. "Yes, I loved you. I _still_ fucking love you! But what good does it do when I'm stuck an entire universe away from you and I can't do anything about it? What good does it do to admit I love you when all it does is _hurt_ me? Do you want me to admit that I fucked up when I left you behind, Win? Because yes, I _fucked up_! But what do you expect me to do about it now? All that I can keep doing is figure out how to somehow keep moving forward, because if I stop, even for just a _second_ to catch my breath, I could die! Even if it means I have to leave this goddamn trail of destruction and chaos in my wake!" 

He stared at her then, his chest heaving as a couple tears slipped down his cheeks even as he tried to fight them. 

"Ed," Winry whispered before standing up and coming over to him, wrapping him in a tight hug. Ed's breathing shook, his mind flicking back to the last time Winry had hugged him like this, rubble and chaos everywhere. Those fifteen stupid minutes he had been playing back in his head over and over and over again for four damn years. He should have said _something_ , he shouldn't have left to find Al alone, hell, he could have even lingered for just a few more minutes so he could have had thirty minutes to play back in his head instead of just _fifteen_. 

"I'm sorry," he croaked, reaching out and hugging her back, like maybe if he squeezed her tighter, he would never have to leave her again, like maybe he could just hold her against him forever.  "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry." 

Ed apologized like other people prayed, squeezing his eyes shut and holding the words deeply in his heart. repeating himself over and over again in the hopes that maybe if he said it enough times, he could be forgiven, absolved somehow from these sins that felt too heavy for his shoulders. 

"It's okay, Ed," Winry whispered, squeezing him just a little tighter. "You don't have to go through this alone."

Ed cried even harder at her words, burying his face against her neck. Winry hummed and rubbed her hands across his back in circles, pressing her face into his shoulder. 

Once the tears had finally stopped coming, other words got a little easier to say. Once Ed had managed to catch his breath, he and Winry sat and traded stories about the differences between their two lives, easily losing track of time as they leaned against each other. Being with Winry was so _easy_ , even when she wasn't _his_ Winry, even when he had spent years away from her. It was just _comfortable_ to trade stories with her, not even pausing the conversation when they had to get up and fix lunch, still chatting even as he cut vegetables and she stirred at a skillet. She touched him so easily, just reaching for his hand or shoulder as she talked, and even that made Ed's heart twist. Something about it reminded him of Noah, how she always had that small flinch hiding behind her eyes whenever she reached out for him, scared he would push her away. He felt guilty for being there with Winry instead of with Noah. What she was experiencing with him gone, anyway?

He and Winry got so sucked into their conversation that they ended up jumping when the knock came at the front door, interrupting Ed from his story about the time his Winry had been a wild woman with a tractor. 

"That'll be Dr. Williams," Winry said with a sigh, patting Ed's knee as she stood up. "Time to see if we can figure out what's going on with that heart of yours, mister."

Ed had been hoping that perhaps the name Dr. Williams was just a simple coincidence. It was a common name, after all. But no, the man who came to the door was all too familiar, even if he had only met the man once before. His childhood memories of Dr. Williams coming and taking his mom's pulse, her temperature, murmuring as he shone a light in her eyes and month... The memories were faded like any other memory from that many years ago, and yet it still cut with painful clarity. He could still remember when he had felt like Dr. Williams was some sort of angel of death. He had never thought that he would be the one getting a special house call from Dr. Williams instead. 

Still, Ed was an adult now. Or at least, that was what he told himself even as his mouth was dry. Even if he was scared, he could be mature enough to sit still and let a freezing stethoscope get pressed against his chest. He was an adult and he could actually understand the concept that the doctor was there to help him, not as some sort of angel of death. 

"Well," Dr. Williams said with a sigh as he pulled away from Ed after several minutes of various tests and questions. "I don't have the most... _refined_ equipment, but I would say I'm pretty sure you're right in guessing he had a heart attack. You said you were going to get a doctor from Central out here?" 

"Oh god," Winry murmured, holding a hand up to her throat with a frown. "Um, yes. Someone should be coming out in a week or so." 

"Well, they'll have access to better tools and medications than a small-town guy like me," Dr. Williams said with a sigh as he started putting his equipment back in his bag. "They should be able to help you figure out why exactly you had a heart attack, since it could be a sign of something bigger. In the meantime, get good rest, try not to get too stressed, and take some aspirin. That should help you avoid further problems until we know more." 

"Thank you for coming all the way out here," Winry said with a sigh. 

"Of course. And did you still want a check-up while I'm here?"

"Uh—" Winry coughed and looked over at Ed, and he swore the blood had drained from her face. What, was she nervous about taking attention away from him? "Sure, but... Maybe we could do it in another room this time?" 

Ed coughed and looked at the floor. Oh. Of course. He wasn't _actually_ her husband, and a check-up could involve things like getting undressed in front of him. Funny how she had been completely comfortable even with sharing a bed with him the night before, but now she was self-conscious. Had hearing about how he had treated his Winry made her suddenly realize the actual significance of someone else being in control of her husband's body?

Just a couple of minutes after Winry and the doctor had gone off to another room, Ed was interrupted out of his thoughts by the whirlwind known as Teddy suddenly coming flying into the room and launching himself on to Ed's lap with more force than even seemed possible for a three-year-old. Ed wheezed and grabbed Teddy instinctively, like a bowling ball had been thrown at his stomach and he could somehow protect himself by catching it. 

"I'm going to need to get going," a small voice said, and Ed looked up to see it was the babysitter girl from before. What was her name again? Anna? Zaza came toddling over as well, motioning at Ed to pick her up and put her on his lap with Teddy. 

"Okay," Ed said, looking over at Anna as he picked up Zaza. "Did I need to pay you or something?" 

"Oh, no! Mrs. Elric already took care of me earlier!" Anna said quickly, and Ed nearly choked at hearing the name. It was such an odd concept to think of Winry as sharing a last name with him instead of just being Winry Rockbell. 

"I just wanted to take a minute to thank you," Anna continued. "If you hadn't been there last month when that barn collapsed, I don't know if my brother would have made it. And just... my whole family is really grateful to you, Mr. Elric."

Ed wasn't sure he liked hearing "Mr. Elric" any better than "Mrs. Elric." He suddenly felt oddly old, the adult in the situation where this teenager was looking up to him as some sort of... _authority_ figure or something. When had that happened, anyway? Who had made the mistake of trusting him with adulthood and responsibility?

"Uh, sure," Ed said with a cough. "No problem." 

It seemed like Anna had only walked out the front door when the phone was suddenly ringing. It really never did stop, did it? He could still remember a similar problem back when his mom had first gotten sick. Once everyone had heard his mom wasn't doing well, it was like the phone had never stopped ringing, someone always calling to offer well wishes, or a casserole, or babysitting or whatnot. He wondered how long it would take before the same thing happened when everyone found out he'd had a heart attack. In a town like Resembool, gossip was sometimes the only entertainment available, which meant news could sometimes rip through town in a matter of hours. 

"Hello?" Ed said as he settled Zaza against his hip, wedging the phone receiver between his shoulder and chin. Zaza took that as her chance to reach her pudgy fingers out for Ed's ponytail, giving it a sharp yank. 

_„Scheiße, Zaza! A_ _utsch_ _!"_ Ed snapped, the words flying out of him before he had a chance to think. Teddy giggled from behind him, and Ed was suddenly grateful that Winry didn't know German. Knowing his luck, Teddy probably had a mind like a steel trap and would end up repeating "scheiße" eventually. At least it didn't matter if no one would recognize the word. But then another familiar laugh from the phone made Ed pause. 

"Enjoying fatherhood, Brother?"

"Al!" Ed gasped, all his attention suddenly on the phone again. Right, Al had said he was going to call again later. And Ed hadn't even figured out what he was going to say this time to make it so Al would actually listen to him. 

"Hey," Al said with a weak chuckle. "How are you feeling, anyway?" 

"Well," Ed started, but was cut off by a loud squeal from Zaza. "I mean, aside from not having any eardrums, I feel fine." 

"Did you get to talk to a doctor?" 

"Uh..." Ed coughed. "Yes."

A long minute stretched out before Al realized Ed wasn't going to say anything else, and he sighed. "And?" 

"And... He says I probably _did_ have a heart attack?"

"Geez," Al muttered. "Okay, well. We're going to be heading out tonight. It's going to take us about a week to cross the desert. Can you just... not get into any further trouble in that time?"

Ed wasn't super familiar with the desert that was between Amestris and Xing, but he had a feeling it meant he wasn't going to get any more phone calls before Al arrived. 

"Of course, Al," Ed said with a snort. "I mean, thanks to you worrying, Mustang is going to be out here tomorrow morning. Between him and Winry, I doubt I'll have even a spare inch to cause trouble."

Al made a sound at the back of his throat like he didn't entirely believe Ed was capable of not causing trouble. A moment of silence hung over the two of them, ripe with all the unsaid things hanging in the air. Ed just wanted Al to be there already, not in a week's time. He didn't know how to navigate any of this without Al. He didn't even know what he could say to convince Al of what was actually happening instead of him just thinking it was some sort of heart attack induced psychosis. 

"I miss you," Ed whispered. 

"I... I know. I miss you too." 

For a minute, Ed suddenly understood what Winry had said the other day when she'd said she loved all the infinite hims out there somewhere, the "greater Ed," as she'd said. Even though he was in an entirely different world, Winry was still Winry and Al was still Al, even if they weren't _his_ Winry and Al. There was some... _spark_ to them that was the same no matter what world he was in, and that was the part of them he could never stop loving. Maybe it was their soul, or maybe even something even deeper than that. Maybe it was the same thing he had seen when he had first bumped into Alfons. 

"Al," he said, squeezing the phone tightly in his hands. He wasn't going to see Al for another week still, and he didn't know how to bear the thought of Al not believing him during that entire time. But what could he even say that would make Al believe him? Well, there was one thing he could think of off the top of his head, but he was a little loathe to bring it up, since it was something they generally avoided talking about. And what if he was remembering something that hadn't even happened in this world? But maybe he had to just trust that the greater Ed part of himself could reach out to the greater Al part of his brother, even if only for a moment. 

"Hey Al, do you remember when you first... when you first were in the armor, and you said you had to relearn how to sense things?" 

"Yeah..." Al said, and Ed could hear the wariness dripping off the corners of the word. 

"You said you had to develop this new sense, because you couldn't _feel_ when you were bumping into things, and you said it was kind of like how Teacher taught us how to sense an opponent sneaking up silently on us even if we were blindfolded. I think you said... it was like being able to feel the entire world around you at once, but... _knowing_ instead of feeling." 

"Okay, and?" 

"Do you still know how to do that?" 

Al sighed. "Of course I know how to do that, Brother. I use that skill all the time with alkahestry." 

"Okay, well. I want you to try using that skill, but see if you can like... use it while you're _thinking_ about me. Like, just think about what I've felt like the times you've called me. And then compare that to your memories of me, and see if they feel different. Okay?"

Winry came back in the room at that point, murmuring a goodbye to Dr. Williams as Ed heard Al sigh from the other end of the phone. 

"Why, Brother?" 

"Just... Please try it. And think about what I was saying this morning. And then you can tell me about it when you get here." 

"Okay," Al said, sounding resigned. 

Winry wanted a chance at the phone after that, mostly so she could trade specifics with Al on what she had been observing of Ed all day. Ed felt a pang of gratitude for her taking the time to reassure Al so much. For one, it meant that Al wouldn't be worrying as much on the trip over there. And for another, she made him sound like he was doing a lot better than she had maybe thought the night before. Which would only make Al think even more about what he'd said, because Winry made it sound like he was doing pretty okay aside from the scare. And Ed didn't just spew nonsense for no reason when he was doing pretty okay. 

Ed managed to get through the rest of the night in a blur. After Winry had gotten all the information she needed from Al, there was a round of everyone wishing him a safe journey and "I love you"s from everyone, even the quiet Zaza pressing her face against the phone to tell her uncle she loved him. Once the phone call was over, the house fell into the same chaotic frenzy Ed had been seeing all day, pressing from one thing to the next without hesitation. There was time playing with the kids while Winry threw dinner together, then there was the chaos of actually trying to have dinner with a couple of toddlers in attendance, then bath time, pajamas, bedtime story, a bedtime kiss on each of their foreheads, dragging Teddy back to bed three times after official bedtime... By the time the house had actually fallen silent, Ed felt ready to fall over from exhaustion. And yet somehow, Winry was still going, buzzing around the house and cleaning up dishes and toys. When she noticed Ed's exhausted expression, she sent him to bed with a laugh, saying she would be up in a minute. 

Ed decided not to even try arguing with her, dragging himself up to the bedroom and flopping on the bed without even bothering to change into his pajamas. After that, he was asleep almost as soon as his head hit the pillow.

The next moment Ed was aware, he was opening his eyes to an empty white void of space. 

He spun around in a panic and found himself face to face with none other than... himself. Or at least, the him he had been trying to be all day. Somehow he could tell just by looking at this guy that he was the Ed that was supposed to be in the body he'd been in all day. The ever so slightly brighter hair, the slightly different clothes, even the extra couple inches of height ( _damn_ that guy)...

"Shit," he and the other him said in unison as their matching golden eyes connected. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey everyone, sorry this took me all day to get posted! It's been a DAY, if you know what I mean, heh. But I loved writing this chapter and I've been so excited to finally get it out. Hope you all enjoyed it, and yes, there'll be some answers next Saturday!


	6. Bigfoot and Pipsqueak

Ed was immediately grateful that they had moved the automail out to the living room, because it meant that the only thing he had to move before collapsing on the bed was the journal Noah had been so mad at him over just a few hours before. After that, he was asleep almost as soon as his head hit the pillow.

The next moment Ed was aware, he was opening his eyes to an empty white void of space.

He spun around in a panic and found himself face to face with none other than... himself. Or at least, the him he had been trying to be all day. Somehow he could tell just by looking at this guy that he was the Ed that was supposed to be in the body he'd been in all day. The ever so slightly darker hair, the slightly different clothes, even the missing couple inches of height (like _hell_ he hadn't noticed).

"Shit," he and the other him said in unison as their matching golden eyes connected. 

They stood like that for what almost felt like an eternity, just staring at this other person who was just slightly too different to be a reflection. The other Ed took a step closer to him, and he mirrored the movement. He felt like they were two tense alley cats, ready to leap for each other's throats at any moment. That made sense, though. The last time he had seen someone wearing his face had been... Well, certainly not pleasant, that much was for certain. And if he had to guess, he'd bet money that this other him had also stared himself down before in less than favorable conditions. Al _had_ mentioned Envy, after all. 

"Hey," Ed finally said, his voice rasping against the word. The other him shot him a glare. 

"Hey yourself," he said with a huff. "What the fuck are we doing here?" 

"Fuck if I know!" Ed said, throwing his hands in the air and waving at the empty space around them. Of course, _of course_ the minute he actually met an alternate version of himself, he was just immediately snappy and suspicious. Because he couldn't expect any better from someone who was just a different version of him, after all. "Aren't you supposed to be the one who's done this before?"

"Well, I—" the other Ed groaned and ran both his hands through his hair with a huff. "I don't know. It wasn't like this last time, okay?" 

"Yeah, good thing, too. I'd rather if this whole experience didn't end with me dying," Ed said with a roll of his eyes. He'd only meant to think it, but apparently, nothing was truly only thoughts in this place. 

The other him snorted. "You _already_ died, dumbass. Why do you think you ended up here?"

Ed's mind flicked back to the night of the switch, how he had been falling over in the cemetery and worrying he was having a heart attack. He could remember how at the time he was absolutely sure he must have died, that was why he had begged for the chance to go back, so his kids wouldn't be alone, so that... But as he thought on the memory, the landscape around him and the other him shifted and swirled, until it was like they were in the cemetery on that dark night. 

And then the other him was suddenly gasping and clutching at his chest. Before Ed could fully understand why his double was somehow having a physical problem in a non-existent _void_ , the other him was falling to the ground. Wait. Something about the way he'd fallen was familiar. Ed looked at the grave the other him had fallen in front of. 

Sure enough, it was their mom's grave. Which meant this was Ed's memory. And the other him was... reliving it for some reason? Could you die again if you died somewhere like this? Why was it even happening?

And then the world spun again, changing into buildings and streets that seemed oddly familiar. Ed was trying to place what about it was so familiar when there was suddenly Winry in front of him, her hair cut short so it lined up with her chin. 

"Winry," Ed breathed, before he'd even had chance to think. It had only been a day, and somehow it felt like forever. He needed to talk with her about what was going on, he needed a partner who would listen to everything he had to say, he needed his _teammate_ back, dammit. But somehow even though he was feeling all kinds of emotions over Winry not being around, it was like he was feeling two sets of emotions at once, and it suddenly hit him that this was similar to when Noah had managed to show him her memory. 

_Oh. This was the other Ed's memory._

The second layer of emotions were heavy in an entirely different way. There was so much guilt it felt like he was suffocating from it, paired with a deep longing and loneliness. Fear. There was definitely lots of fear. And a feeling like he got when he was sure he had forgotten something at home but couldn't remember what. Like something needed to be done, like things were unfinished, raw...

"Ah! Excuse me!" Winry chirped at him. "I didn't see— Hey, are you okay?" 

And then _he_ was the one gasping and clutching at his chest before he fell to the ground. This was another heart attack. The other him had a heart attack too. And it must have been right before he'd shown up in the other world, because he could vaguely remember that street and how Winry had been looming over him, how he'd thought she was _his_ Winry... 

_Void. Void, void, void._ As weird as it was, he suddenly wanted the void to go back to being a void. He wanted the empty space back, not this Winry in front of him and this pain in his chest that went so much deeper than a simple heart attack. And to his relief, as he focused on the idea of the void, the space swirled again and transformed back to the white space they had been in before. 

"I don't think this is the Gate," he said in a low tone as he pulled himself up and brushed himself off. It was a useless gesture, really, considering they were in a space where dirt didn't exist, where even his own pants didn't exist. But there was something comforting to brushing himself off after being on the ground. 

The other him snorted. "What makes you so sure? I'm the one who's done this before, remember?" 

"Alright," Ed said, and held out his arms open wide. "Point number one. If this is the Gate, then where exactly is the _Gate_?" 

The other him turned to look, and Ed could tell the minute it clicked for him, because suddenly his eyes went wide and he spun around in a circle. 

"Okay, well, that doesn't mean—" 

"Point number two," Ed interrupted with a roll of his eyes. The other him shot him a glare. "I gave up my Gate. I shouldn't theoretically have one to visit at all." 

"What?" the other him made a face. "What do you mean you gave up _your_ Gate? You can't do that." 

"Well," Ed shrugged. "I've done a lot of things that theoretically aren't able to be done. And yet..."

"No, that's not the point," the other him sighed with a huff. "I mean it's _impossible_. That's like trying to say... I don't know, that you just decided to make a town not exist one day. It's not for you to decide."

"Well, I did it anyway." 

"No, that's not—" the other him let out an aggravated groan. "Why would you even _do_ that, anyway?"

Ed snorted and stared at his other self. Why were there even questions like this between the two of them, anyway? If they were both Edward Elric, shouldn't they just automatically understand the choices they each made? "Why do you fucking think? What would we have given _anything_ for?"

The other him went quiet, his mouth becoming a tight line. "Ah."

A long moment of silence passed between the two of them before the other him eventually huffed and crossed his arms over his chest. "Well, that hardly seems fair. I had to give my freaking _life_." 

Ed wished he could say the words surprised him, but it was such a normal thought to him that he mostly just felt a sense of _Yeah, that lines up._ There was one thing that didn't really make sense if that was what had happened, though. 

"How are you still alive if you had to give your life?" Ed glanced the other him over with a frown. Al had deliberately skipped around a few explanations, other than explaining that travel between the two worlds required the Gate, and using the Gate meant some sort of sacrifice. Ed still felt pretty confused on what exactly had happened that ended in those two getting to Germany. 

"It doesn't matter," the other him said with a wave of his hand. "What matters is figuring out why we're here. Did we die again, or what?" 

Ed swallowed a lump in his throat at the thought. "I hope not." What was the last thing he could remember, anyway? He flicked his mind back through the day. He could remember eating a bowl of soup as he looked at the automail on the table, oh, and then there was Al and Noah dancing, and his awkward attempt, and then... Bed, right. The world shifted as he flicked though his memories, smoothly flowing from one to the next until he settled on the memory of climbing into bed. 

"Night, Al," the other him mumbled and flopped on the bed. The Al in his memory was looking over at him with a soft smile that Ed couldn't entirely place. 

"Goodnight," Al said, and the word hung heavily in the air, feeling unfinished. No "Brother" to finished the phrase off like he always did, just an awkward goodnight that they both knew was an attempt to avoid the awkwardness of what Ed should be called. 

"Well, I don't think I died," Ed said, letting the memory fade away to white again. "I think I just fell asleep. What's the last thing you remember?"

The world shifted and swirled around them again, but this time it was Ed getting dragged through a montage of memories. First he was murmuring on the phone to Al, wishing him safe travels and exchanging "love yous," then there was Teddy making an absolute mess of a plate of food, then a whispered "goodnight" and pulling the covers over Teddy.

Finally the world settled and he was back in their kitchen, leaning against the counter and trying to dry dishes as Winry washed them, even though he was so tired he felt like he was going to pass out on the spot. Winry looked over at him and gave him a soft smile. 

"Why don't you just go to bed? The doctor said you should rest," she said, reaching out and patting his shoulder. He nodded and put the plate he was drying on the counter. "I'll be up in a minute." 

"Mmkay. Night, Win," he mumbled, already staggering out of the kitchen. Then the memory was fading away and they were both back to that white space, staring at one another.

"Okay," the other him said, taking a deep breath. "Okay, so, we're both asleep then. But why would that make us switch back?" 

"Well, our bodies are unconscious, so maybe without that, our souls are naturally feeling pulled to go back where they're supposed to be," Ed said, scratching at his chin. "Maybe us meeting up here is like... two cars passing one another as they go in different directions." 

"Well," the other him said with a huff. "Then why have the two cars stopped in the middle of the road to stare at each other, smart guy? Why aren't we just switching back already?"

"I don't know, it's not like I'm some sort of body-switching expert," Ed said with a roll of his eyes. "Maybe it's because we're asleep or something. Maybe we're just stuck... hanging out until we wake up." 

The two of them stared at each other for a long minute in silence, contemplating the idea of hanging out with the other. The other him made a face and looked away with a scowl. "Ew." 

"Gee, thanks," Ed muttered. "It's not like I'm exactly excited about it either." 

"Well, I'm not going to call you 'Ed.' That's weird." 

"Yes, because standing with your alternate self in the middle of a void _isn't_ weird." 

The other him huffed and narrowed his eyes. "Whatever. I'm just going to call you Two." 

"Two?! What makes you think _you're_ number one?" 

The other him shrugged. "I dunno. I just get the feeling that I came first."

"I'm pretty sure we have the same birthday, you dipshit!" The other him just shrugged at that as if he couldn't be bothered to care, and Ed snapped. "Fine! Well, if you're going to call me Two, I'm going to call you pipsqueak, because you're the _shorter_ one!" 

The other Ed's eyes flashed, and he clenched his hands into fists. "You _know_ that's low."

"Not as low as you." 

"Oh, that's it!" The other him lunged for Ed's throat with a screech, and Ed instinctively protected himself with his right hand while bending down to try and jab a punch at the other Ed's gut. But before his punch actually had a chance to land, the other him jumped away, doing the classic move of turning his dodge into a kick aimed at Ed's head. Ed almost wanted to sigh and roll his eyes. Was his fighting honestly this predictable?

They continued fighting like that for longer than Ed really cared to admit. Neither of them seemed capable of landing a hit on the other one. It was just too easy for both of them to predict exactly how their double would fight, and so they just kept throwing and dodging hits without anything actually landing. But they were also both too proud to admit that it was a fight they couldn't win and it would be easier to just not fight at all. Apparently, that was the secret to perpetual energy all along, just stick two Eds in a void and have one call the other short. 

When they finally had a small break in the fight that sent them both stumbling back a couple of feet from each other, they just stood there, staring at each other. It felt like they should both be panting after fighting that hard for that long, though Ed couldn't even honestly say how long they had been fighting. It was impossible to tell how much time was passing in that place. 

"Look, this isn't going to go anywhere," Ed said with a sigh. "Even if we _could_ land a punch on each other, it's not like it's going to do anything. We don't even _have_ bodies to hurt here." 

The other him glowered at Ed, but didn't seem to have any argument to yell in response. Ed decided to take that as a win, even if it was a small one. 

"So I won't call you Pipsqueak, but that means you don't get to call me Two. Let's figure out different names." 

"Whatever, Bigfoot." 

Ed frowned and raised an eyebrow. "Is that... Is that supposed to be an insult?"

"Whatever," the other him muttered with a roll of his eyes. "Let's just figure out something we don't have in common. Was your last name Elric?"

"Yeah. Codename Fullmetal?" 

"Yeah." The other him furrowed his eyebrows, and then the landscape was shifting until Ed suddenly found himself in his kitchen back home. Winry was smiling at him and patting his shoulder. He wanted to just grab her and hug her tightly and never let go, but he was stuck in the other Ed's memory the way he'd experienced it. 

"She's named after your grandmother."

Ed blinked. "I didn't know I had one."

"We must have slightly different family lines," the other him muttered, tapping at his chin. The world faded back to white, and even though it had only been a memory of Winry, Ed found himself missing her even more than just a moment before. "Which means our mom would have... Hey, what's your middle name?"

"What? Oh no." Ed frowned and shook his head. "I am _not_ going by my middle name." 

"Oh come on," the other him said with a shrug. "Let's just see if they're different. My middle name's Sylvan." 

"Oh, yeah, yep, mmhm, they're different." Ed pressed his lips together and nodded. "But I'm not ever going to be called by my middle name, so that's still not going to work." 

"Why? How bad could your middle name be?" 

"Uh..." Ed sighed and crossed his arms over his chest. "Well, think of the worst person in the world you could ever be named after." 

The other him snorted, his face cracking into a wide grin. "What, is your middle name Roy?"

"I wish," Ed muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose and squeezing his eyes shut. "No. Think of our mom, of someone she would have known and looked up to." 

The other him frowned for a minute, and then his eyes widened. "Oh no." 

"Oh yes."

"Mom named you after _Dad_?" 

"Yeah, so I'd rather not get called by that name," Ed said with a sigh. There was a pause between the two of them, and when Ed looked up, his double was doing That Smirk. The smirk that Ed knew had some sort of terrible mockery behind it. He rolled his eyes with a heavy sigh. " _What_." 

"Your initials spell 'ehe.'" The other him paused slightly, biting at his lip like he was so amused he couldn't keep it all inside. "Should I just call you Giggle?"

"I'm going to kill you," Ed muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose. Was there really much worse possible torture than being trapped in a void with yourself? "Look, just call me Bigfoot if it makes you feel better. Whatever, I don't care. And I can just call you Sylvan." 

"Why is it somehow less satisfying to call you that when you ask?" 

"Because we thrive off insulting ourself," Ed said with a sigh. "Does it really matter as long as you have something to call me?"

"Whatever, Bigfoot," Sylvan said with a roll of his eyes. "We need to focus on figuring out what the hell is going on, anyway." 

Ed frowned. "I thought we had. We're just sleeping, and I guess we're here because we're switching back, and then everything will be back to normal in the morning."

Sylvan turned back to look at Ed then, and it was an expression that Ed hated seeing looking at him with his own eyes. It was an expression of deep, deep pain and regret. And he was pretty sure that it didn't mean anything good about the situation they were currently in. He didn't know if he wanted to hear everything that had happened to cause Sylvan to look at him with that kind of expression. He didn't even want to remember the things that had caused him that kind of pain, let alone a whole new set of painful memories from an alternate him. 

"It's never that simple. Never," Sylvan whispered. "First of all, you pointed out that maybe we're not in the Gate. Okay. Well, then where are we? And why exactly did it make us switch? Even if we do switch back and everything is normal in the morning, how can we be sure it won't happen again?" 

Ed frowned. Okay, _now_ Sylvan was actually sounding like he had done this before. Ed hadn't even thought to question if it would happen again. But of course Sylvan was questioning that. He had probably already thought it would never happen again, and yet here he was. He took in a deep breath and clapped his hands together. Casually, his fingers pointed toward the ground and definitely not expecting anything to happen. But it still helped him to think. 

"Okay," Ed said with a nod. "Okay. We can figure this out. We're already one of the smartest guys around, and now there's two of us. We can come up with something."

"Like what?" Sylvan sighed, gesturing towards the space around them. "What can we figure out when we're literally in the middle of nowhere? We don't have enough information to figure anything out. How can we figure this place out when we haven't even been here more than once?"

"That's not true," Ed said, his mind flicking back to that time immediately after he had collapsed in the cemetery. The landscape around them didn't change, but he could tell Sylvan was reliving his memory, because his eyes got wide and he spun around wildly.

"Truth! Truth please!" Sylvan screamed, his voice cracking on the words. "Any price you need, anything, please, I'll pay it! My kids don't deserve this! Please, I have to go back!"

_Are you happy with how it all turned out, Alchemist?_

Ed spun at the words. It sounded like what he expected of Truth, but he couldn't see Truth anywhere around in the memory. He found himself wondering if memories got his bias here. Like, if he brought up a memory where he had his eyes closed, would he be able to see the memory anyway? Could it just be that he wasn't seeing Truth because Truth had been standing behind him or something?

"No!" Sylvan screamed. His voice was loud in an almost unholy way, and then the landscape around them turned black and dark for the briefest of moments, and then it was back to the same never-ending white as before.

"Okay, if it's not the Gate, why did Truth respond when I called out to it?" Ed said. Sylvan raised an eyebrow at him. 

"Who?" 

"Truth, you know," Ed said, his eyebrows bunched together. "You know, the... thing, the... uh... Gate... _keeper_? The thing that actually took away your arm and leg. _You know_." 

"You mean the... Shadow people things _inside_ the Gate?" Ed said with a frown. "Like... Wrath before he was Wrath?" 

" _What_?" Ed said, his frown getting even more intense. "No, not homunculi. The... Truth. You know. The one who's outside the Gate and is like... Nothing. Like, there and not at the same time." 

"Yeah, ya lost me, Bigfoot." 

"Okay, whatever," Ed said with a wave of his hands. "It's weird that you don't remember it, but trust me, if you went to the Gate and lost your limbs, then you must have met it. It's impossible otherwise." 

"What, like how it's impossible that you could have traded your Gate away for Al?" 

"No, no." Ed shook his head and frowned at Sylvan. "Trust me, you think it's impossible, but it's _impossible_. If you lost your limbs and gained something in return, Truth was involved, believe me. Even if it was just a disconnected voice or something." 

"Okay, and why exactly does this guy matter?" 

Ed sighed. "Because, I've only ever seen Truth at the Gate. If Truth is here, then—" 

"Yeah, except is Truth even here?" Sylvan said with a sigh. "Because I haven't seen him here or anything, and it doesn't seem like he's here now. I mean, wouldn't he say something if he were here? Besides, what about the fact that there isn't any Gate?" 

"Well, maybe that's because I traded it away." 

"Well, I didn't trade mine away. I can totally do alchemy in your world, so..." 

"Wait, you could do alchemy even though you were in my body?" Ed said, leaning towards Sylvan with wide eyes. He then hummed and tapped a finger against his chin. "I guess that makes sense, though. Alchemy must be connected to the soul, then. What happened?" 

Sylvan let out a bitter chuckle, and then the landscape was shifting into a memory again. In the next moment, Ed found himself in the dark kitchen, transmuting a bowl of water so it would be hot, and then Winry was suddenly there with a shocked expression on her face. Ed found himself not paying much attention to the exact words she was saying. He had known her long enough that he could guess what she was saying without hearing her say it. Instead, he focused on trying to soak up all the details of her he had been missing all day, the curve of her face, the way her hair swung as she talked passionately, the way her loose nightgown skimmed over her. He had always liked that nightgown, but he hadn't seen her wear it for a while. Probably not since she had last... been pregnant with Azami. 

"Hang on," Ed said with a wave of his hand, as he felt a ball of tension settle in the pit of his stomach. The memory suddenly faded away, Sylvan looking at him with a confused expression. Ed flicked over his own memories from just before the switch. He remembered that Winry had been coming down to breakfast a little later lately than she normally did, but he had thought that was just because she was overworking herself for the Johannsen shipment. She also had been eating less at breakfast, usually fixing herself a bowl of oatmeal. God, oatmeal! Ed wanted to slap himself. How had he not recognized it when she was eating _oatmeal_? The only time he had seen her eat oatmeal was when—

"What—" 

"Hey, was Winry sick this morning?" Ed said, and Sylvan barely had time to respond before the landscape shifted to a different memory. Suddenly Ed was standing outside the bathroom door at home, Zaza pressed against his hip. _Zaza_. He wanted to squeeze her against him and blow raspberries on her tummy, but he was stuck in the way the memory went. Zaza wasn't actually there, only the memory of her. Ed wanted to scream. He couldn't wait to switch back and see her in the morning. 

"Winry?" he frowned and knocked at the bathroom door. He could feel Sylvan's emotions pushing at him, mostly confusion as to why Winry had just suddenly run off in the middle of their conversation. Ed felt the tense ball in his stomach tighten. "You okay?"

"Yeah," Winry croaked through the door, and then made a retching sound. "I just... I forgot I can't have dairy first thing in the morning." 

"Dairy!" Ed shouted, making the memory suddenly snap away. Sylvan looked at him like he'd lost his mind. "Winry can never have milk when she's pregnant!" They'd both laughed about it when she had been pregnant with Teddy, Winry saying the baby was probably going to come out hating milk as much as his dad, but to both their surprise, Teddy actually seemed to love the stuff. Then it had happened again when Winry got pregnant with Azami and Winry had started figuring that it was just a sensitivity she had as a result of being pregnant. 

"Wait," Sylvan said, his eyes going wide. "Winry's _pregnant_?" 

"I think so!" Ed said, his face cracking into a wide grin. "I mean, I would have to _see_ , but... Oh, I bet she was just waiting until the birthday party so she could tell us all at the same time!"

"No, but..." Sylvan said, and Ed actually turned his attention to his double. Sylvan somehow managed to look like the blood had drained from his face, even though he didn't have blood or even a physical face for it to drain from. Ed bit his lip to keep himself from chuckling. He could remember feeling about the same way when he had first found out Winry was pregnant with Teddy. 

"Relax," he said, flashing the other him what he hoped was a reassuring grin. "I'm sure we'll switch back after this, and you won't have to deal with any of it."

"O-Okay," Sylvan said, his eyes still unsure. 

"Just..." Ed tried to take a deep breath, still grinning widely. He felt like he had missed out on so much after just missing one day, and Winry hadn't even announced she was pregnant yet. "Can you just... Show me everything that happened since we switched? So I'm not... confused when we switch back." 

The way time passed in the void was different from how time normally passed in the physical realm, moving both incredibly fast and slow all at the same time. Sylvan was able to catch Ed up on the entire day, and it felt like everything was passing in normal time for Ed. Yet once the memories stopped, it felt like he had just been remembering something that had happened. It hadn't really taken time because it had already taken time before and he had just been remembering it somehow. So once he had caught up on the entire day, he offered the same to Sylvan and recounted his day with Noah. 

"Your Charleston really needs some work," Sylvan said with a wry grin, and Ed actually laughed. It just felt easier to laugh, knowing he would get to be home and see his kids again soon, that he would be able to hug Winry and tease her for trying to hide a pregnancy from him. It had just been a weird day, but the end was in sight. He was going to get to go _home_. And hell, he was even going to have Al coming out to see him instead of having to take an awful trip across the desert. It would all be over soon and he would be able to just have his family back. 

"I don't think that's really going to matter," Ed said, and Sylvan snorted. "No one will even know what that dance is once I go home." 

"What, you're going to refuse the chance to start a new dance trend?" 

"Eh, I've had enough fame for one lifetime, honestly." 

There was a pause between the two of them after that, like they were slowly running out of words the closer they got to waking up. It was like on some level Ed could feel time passing in the physical world, even if everything felt unending and timeless in the void. But there was still something he wanted to say before he woke up, something important.

"Thanks," Ed said softly, rubbing the back of his neck. Sylvan suddenly snapped his attention up, looking at Ed with wide eyes. "Thanks for... taking care of my family." 

"Oh, yeah, no problem," Sylvan mumbled with a shrug. "It's what you would have done. Hell, it _is_ what you did. Noah... She... Thanks." 

"Are you... Do you love her back?"

Sylvan choked, suddenly managing to blush despite being in a void with no body. What can I say? Eds have a natural instinct for being embarrassed, so much so that it transcends physical limitations. 

"L-Like it's any business of yours!" Sylvan spluttered. He then let out a yelp and clapped his hands over his ears, Ed assumed because he didn't want to hear anything else that might make him have to get in touch with his feelings. Ed raised an eyebrow with a smirk. 

"You know, it's okay if you're in love with her. It's not like it's the end of the world. And you're in a pretty decent place in terms of settling down..." He paused and frowned as he looked at Sylvan, who was still pressing his hands against his ears. His face was screwed up like he was in pain, so Ed reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. "Hey, you okay?" 

"What _the hell_ is that sound?" Sylvan shouted back, loud enough that it made Ed wince. He looked around at the space with a frown. There wasn't _any_ sound. It was actually disturbingly quiet. There wasn't even the distant sound of traffic or anything, just empty nothingness. 

"What are you talking—" Ed started, but before he could finish the thought, Sylvan let out a frustrated scream between his teeth, and then he was just... gone.

Ed blinked and stared at the space where his double had just been. What had just happened? That... Hadn't looked good at all. There hadn't been... Some sort of accident or something, had there? He frowned and started pacing, waiting to see if the other him would reappear if just given enough time. But as nothing continued to happen, he started getting nervous. 

"Truth?" he said, glancing around the space as if he would magically get answers just because he was asking for them. I don't think so, buddy. 

_Time to wake up._

Ed woke up with a gasp, coming back to reality faster than his lungs could keep up with. He was confused for a minute, taking a minute to realign himself with reality. Right, there had been that weird lack of anything space, and he had talked to the other him. And they were going to switch back. He would get to see his kids again. Winry was _pregnant_!

"Win—" he called out with a grin as he started to sit up. But as soon as he put pressure on his right arm, he was immediately hit with the sense of knowing it was wrong. Again. He could feel a prosthetic again, and if he could feel that, then that meant he wasn't home. The tears sprang to his eyes almost immediately. No. _No_. He was supposed to be _home_ now, dammit!

"Brother? Brother, what's wrong?" Ed could hear Al come over to him, and then there was an arm around his shoulders. Ed's brain flicked back to the entire day, how Al hadn't been calling him "Brother" all day, how _his_ Al was supposed to be in a caravan crossing the desert, not in a bed across the room. 

"I-I'm not your b-brother, Al," Ed said between shaky breaths. "Don't call me that if you're just going to t-take it a-away again."

There was a long pause, and Ed felt the hand that had been rubbing his shoulder freeze. Eventually, Al took in a deep breath and murmured, "I'm sorry." 

Once Ed had managed to calm down again, he tried to go back to sleep. He didn't want to face being awake and still in this life. Maybe if he could just get back to the void, he and his double could actually switch properly. Maybe they could just meet back up and actually trade lives properly, like they were going to do before whatever had interrupted them. He just had to hope and pray that the fact that he was in this life at all was a sign that things weren't worse. After all, if his body had died, they would have switched back, right? That was what Al had said, at least. Which meant that it must have just been that Sylvan had been startled awake. Maybe he would just go back to sleep and they could switch properly. 

There had to be a way to switch back. _There just had to._

* * *

"Are you... Do you love her back?"

Ed choked at the question, feeling his insides twist into knots. His brain flicked back to the dream he'd had just the night before, when Noah had been kissing him and he'd been enjoying it, wishing he had would just let himself be close to her instead of holding her at arm's length. He desperately tried to focus on something other than the memory though, since he definitely did not want the experience of watching that memory get played out by his double in 3D space around him. 

"L-Like it's any business of yours!" Ed spluttered. He opened his mouth to say more and tell off the other him, but before he could get a word out, all sound was cut off by the sound of an obnoxiously loud bell. Ed yelped and clapped his hands over his ears, looking around and trying to pinpoint where it was coming from. He couldn't remember ever hearing a bell that loud before. Was this some sort of weird Gate phenomena? Or was this something else, somehow? 

He then noticed that the other guy was saying something, but he couldn't make out any of the words over the sound of ringing. He squeezed his eyes shut, not even bothering to respond. It wasn't like it would matter when he wouldn't be able to hear anything said in response, anyway. He felt like he was somehow dying by sound, like he was being shaken apart by his core. 

And then there was a hand on his shoulder, gentle and reassuring. It reminded him of Al for a minute, and he opened his eyes, only to find himself looking at a worried version of his own face. Oh, right. He was saying something, though Ed had no idea what. 

"What _the hell_ is that sound?" Ed shouted, and his double frowned and looked around as if he would be able to solve the problem just by seeing it. Except there wasn't any bell. Ed had already been looking and trying to figure out where the sound was coming from. Maybe the other guy couldn't even hear the damn thing. 

Ed clenched his teeth together and let out a muffled scream, pressing his hands tighter against his head. He just wanted the problem to go away, wanted to make it stop, wanted to—

In the next moment, the sound was suddenly quieter, and Ed realized that was because it was coming from a particular place rather than feeling like it was bouncing around in his own skull. He cracked open his eyes and looked around. 

He was in the double bed, and although it was empty, he knew it was the one in the Rockbell house. _Dammit_. And the alarm on Winry's nightstand was going off, though Winry was nowhere in sight. Ed groaned and rolled across the bed to turn the damn thing off. Once the noise had finally stopped, he groaned and buried his face in the pillow. He couldn't really say he was surprised that they hadn't actually switched, but he still had been hoping that maybe, just maybe, Bigfoot was actually on to something. But no. 

For a minute, he debated if he could get away with just going straight back to sleep. He didn't want to wake up and face Winry and what was probably going to be another exhausting day of parenting. But then the thought of potentially hopping back to the void only to have to answer questions about why they hadn't switched back popped into his head. 

Ed decided it would be easiest to just wake up and deal with the day. He would face his double later. 

As he got up and staggered over to the dresser, Ed decided that he was going to dress more like himself. The day before, he had just thrown on the first pants and shirt he had run across without giving it much thought. But he was slowly settling into the idea that he didn't know how long he was going to be in this world. Why spend that time not wearing the sorts of clothes he wanted? 

Thankfully, he and his double seemed to have a similar enough style, and it was easy to find clothes pretty similar to the style and color palette he had gotten used to in Germany. For a minute, Ed almost considering going back to the bright colors he had worn back before he had hopped worlds and had felt the urge to try blending in and not drawing attention to himself, but it had been seven years. His waistcoat was more a habit now than his red coat had ever gotten the chance to be. 

The only thing Ed couldn't find somewhere in the drawer was an arm garter. He considered not wearing one for a minute, since he had only started wearing it to stop his shirts from catching on his automail in the first place. Not much point to that when this body didn't even have an automail arm. But he had gotten used to the look and feel of the arm garter, and it was an easy fix anyway. He had alchemy again, and there was a spare belt that he was sure wouldn't be missed. 

When he looked in the mirror, it was almost reassuring and uncanny at the same time. It was almost like every other time he'd looked at himself in the mirror with this same outfit, and yet it was different too. Not enough to just be different, but enough that it felt like he was looking at a slightly distorted version of himself. His hair was ever so slightly brighter, not enough to matter, but enough that he noticed. He was just a bit less lanky and a bit broader. He supposed that made sense, considering his double was a father in farm country. Plus he had half the automail, which had to make it a little easier to actually put on muscle. 

Ed sighed. Still. Even just making himself look a little more like _himself_ seemed to help somehow, even if he couldn't say why. He took a deep breath and headed downstairs to find Winry. 

He eventually managed to find her in the living room, though she was accompanied by another couple of pairs of eyes that looked over to him as soon as he walked into the room. 

"Sorry about the alarm," Winry said, standing up and coming over to Ed with a gentle smile. "I heard the door, and then I got distracted." 

"Morning, Fullmetal," Mustang said from his spot on the sofa beside Hawkeye. His eyes were twinkling in the obnoxious way that made Ed think he had to be laughing inside his own head. "By all means, don't let us interrupt your beauty sleep. We all know you need every minute you can get." 

Ed rolled his eyes. "Oh, so is _that_ why you're always napping on the job? Mustang, you should have told me; I would have let you sleep in more often. You know how much I care about charity work!" 

"Very funny," Mustang said in a flat tone, but Ed could tell he was amused by the way his eyes flashed. "Now, are you ready to actually tell me what's going on?'

"Ready as I'll ever be," Ed muttered. "Let's do this."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that chapter was an adventure. I swear, the entire time was pretty much me just rolling my eyes and being like "Really guys? Really? We're in the middle of a void and you're focusing on... Height jabs and fistfights." I'm not surprised, just... disappointed.


	7. Impossible Solutions

Something about seeing Winry and his kids, thinking he would go home and all this would just be a bad dream, but then watching as any hope of that evaporated broke something deep within Ed. He couldn't seem to fully fall asleep again, but he still stayed in bed, curled under the covers even as he heard Al getting up and getting ready for the day. He could hear the low discussion in German that happened in the other room as he stayed in bed and stared at the wall. He knew they were discussing him, but he still didn't have the heart to move. He didn't know how to just keep moving around and pretending everything was fine when it was the opposite of fine. He stayed in the same spot even as he heard Al come back in the room and quietly lay a hand against his shoulder. 

"I'm going to have to get going for work soon," Al murmured. Ed gave him a nod to show he was listening. "Is there anything I can get you before I leave?" 

There was a long pause between the two of them, the words hanging heavily in the air. Ed barely had a moment to think to himself that it was a positively pregnant pause, and then he was suddenly holding back tears again just from the word "pregnant" having popped into his head. Winry was pregnant again and he hadn't had a chance to celebrate with her, to hug her, kiss her, and tell her how excited he was. 

"No, Al," Ed choked out, pulling the covers a little tighter around himself. "I don't think anything I want is something you can get for me." 

There was another long, _quiet_ pause before Ed finally heard the rustling of Al leaving the room. Then he heard Al say something more to Noah in German. There were a couple of minutes of hushed conversation, as if they were worried he would understand if they talked loudly enough for him to hear. He almost wanted to poke his head out the door just to tell them that he wouldn't understand this foreign language, there was no reason to tiptoe around. But before he could work up the energy to be angry, the conversation stopped and he heard the front door close. Al had gone to work, then. He breathed a small sigh of relief. Maybe now he would just be left to mope in peace. 

Ed thought he would feel better once he knew Al was gone and he wouldn't have to try any further, but instead, it just felt like he was beginning to choke, the walls closing in around him. He wanted, no, _needed_ to get out of there, but there was nowhere he could even think of that was where he needed to go. He didn't know anywhere in this city, this country, this world. And all he wanted more than anything was a familiar face. Well, maybe not just a familiar face. Those seemed to be in excess here, and yet nothing was familiar about these people at all. Well, they were and they weren't familiar all at once. 

Whatever the case, he needed to get out. 

Ed dragged himself out of bed and staggered over to the dresser. What he ended up finding was an absolute abundance of sensible, adult clothes in muted colors, and for the first time in years, he felt himself disgusted by the thought. He didn't feel sensible in the slightest. He wanted to yell and scream and wear colors that made everyone yell at him and tell him how tacky his style was. God, what he wouldn't give for even just a stupid jab from Ling about his clothing. Anyone, any kind of familiar reaction would be welcome. 

He decided against the clothes in the dresser and instead stumbled out into the living room in the same clothes he had been wearing the day before. He had been too tired to ask Al about pajamas the night before, too disoriented to even care. He hadn't even bothered to pull his hair out of its ponytail, and it was a frizzy mess, the ribbon barely hanging on and strands of hair hanging freely around his face. He was sure he looked a mess, but he didn't have it in him to care. 

Of course, the first sight he was greeted with as soon as he stepped into the living room was the automail sitting on the table, still half disassembled. 

It looked so much like Winry's worktable back at home that for a minute he actually thought maybe he had been mistaken, that maybe Winry actually was here. But the truth came back almost as quickly as it left him, and Ed was stuck staring at the automail and gasping for breath. He wanted to sweep it off the table, throw it out the window and get it as far away from him as possible. Thankfully, a small part of his brain actually remained slightly logical and immediately reminded him that if he did that, he could break it beyond repair, and since it was the only piece of Winry he had in this world, it was kind of important to keep it working. 

So Ed stood there, frozen as his brain was torn between hating the automail and wanting to get it as far away from him as possible versus loving it and wanting to hold it and never let it go. Torn in half from the indecision, Ed's brain instead opted for the best compromise it knew to do, and Ed sank to his knees with a scream, pressing his hands against his forehead. 

Noah was on the sofa reading and hadn't noticed Ed coming out of his bedroom, but as soon as he screamed, she was up and by his side in an instant. 

He still had people counting on him, people who depended on him, and he couldn't let them down. He had to get up, had to get home, had to- Ed's side cramped and he cried out in pain, pressing his hands to his side as if he could reassure himself that it was whole, he was fine, this wasn't like last time. He could distantly hear Noah saying something, but his mind wasn't focused on her. He was a million miles away, years away, surrounded by steel bars and blood. He could feel his breath rattling around in his chest and he knew something was wrong, but not in the way he was thinking it had to be wrong, just _wrong_ somehow, somehow he had to figure it out, pull himself out of this, do something, get off the floor, _do something_.

He wasn't sure how long he sat on the floor like that, but eventually, he became aware of his actual surroundings instead of the memories in his head. The way the wooden floor was smooth and cold against his fingers. He took in a shaky breath and closed his eyes, trying to focus on the feeling of his lungs stretching and filling with the air.

Noah was talking, and even though he didn't understand the words she was saying, there was something comforting to it. Her words were regular and rhythmic, in a way that almost reminded Ed of riding trains and feeling the tracks clattering underneath. When he cracked his eyes open, he could see her sitting in front of him, twisting her fingers together like she didn't know what to do with them. Ed slid his eyes shut again and focused on just her words, letting the pieces of himself slowly pull back together.

It almost felt like being back in that void space again, but somehow without being asleep. He could just drift on Noah's words, letting them run through his ears without having to focus on the meaning, only the cadence and sweet tone of Noah's voice. But the feeling was familiar, like Ed was floating between worlds, between lives, like he could somehow just access his double's memories without even trying.

"I don't even know what would best help you," Noah said, her voice cracking on the words.

"Winry always used to touch my face," Ed murmured.

Silence fell over the room, Noah taking in a sharp breath and stopping her constant stream of babbling. Ed frowned, wondering why she would suddenly stop talking just because he had talked back. After all, it wasn't that surprising that he would eventually get past the worst part of a panic attack and would be able to talk again.

And then it suddenly hit him. He had spoken in German. Noah had said something in German and then he had responded _in German._ Ed's eyes snapped open.

 _„Was?"_ Noah whispered. Her eyes were rimmed with red, and Ed wondered if she had been crying because of him. But he had promised— No, wait, that hadn't been a promise to Noah.

But he hadn't intuitively understood her that time. He wasn't doing the same thing he had been doing before. Ed frowned at the thought. How exactly had the understanding come so easily to him before? He held up a finger to Noah and squeezed his eyes shut again, focusing on the feeling of the void again, trying to snap his brain back to the same mindset. Having his eyes closed helped somehow, like not having visual stimulation helped to remind him of that space with nothing.

"I'm trying," he whispered, his voice scraping across the words. It felt like he hadn't talked in years, and he wasn't even entirely sure which language he was talking in. Everything felt nebulous and vague, and yet he somehow had to find a way to maintain that while focusing at the same time. Wait, something about that feeling was familiar. Where had he felt that before, anyway?

The answer hit him like a ton of bricks. _Alchemy_.

Talking to Noah in German required the same kind of focus that transmuting always had. It had just been so long since he had done it that it took him a minute to even recognize the feeling. Embarrassing, really, that the great and mighty Fullmetal Alchemist couldn't even remember what it felt like to transmute.

"It's not completely gone," he said with a little laugh, opening his eyes and looking down at his mismatched hands. There was something so familiar to the entire situation, being in the middle of a problem that terrified the living daylights out of him. Something familiar to this feeling of having to focus his energy on something bigger and more nebulous than him while somehow remembering to also stay grounded. It was all somehow so familiar, so... _exhilarating_ that he felt downright giddy. Or maybe that was the memory of constantly being hopped up on adrenaline and teenage amounts of testosterone.

"What's not completely gone?" Noah said, raising an eyebrow at him. Ed looked up at her, a grin stretching across his face.

"Me," he whispered.

* * *

"Well, someone needs to get breakfast ready for the kids before they wake up," Winry said with a sigh, reaching out and patting Ed on the shoulder. She paused, her hand lingering on his shoulder and she looked over his outfit. Her fingers trailed down from his shoulder to the sleeve garter on his arm. "What are you wearing? It looks... _nice_."

"Winry," Ed hissed, the hairs on his arm standing up. He glanced over to Mustang and Hawkeye over on the sofa before adding, "Please remember _which one_ I am?"

"Right," Winry said, blinking and shaking her head like she was pulling herself out of a dream. She pulled her hand away from him, her fingers hovering in the air like she couldn't decide what to do with them. Ed resisted the urge to roll his eyes. No wonder she and his double already had two children. Or even... He glanced down at her belly, then back up at her face. No, his double couldn't be right about her being pregnant, could he?

Oh, who was Ed kidding? Of course Bigfoot was right. Winry was his wife, after all. _Of course_ he knew all of her habits.

"I'm going to make some eggs," Winry said, turning to look at Mustang and Hawkeye. "How do you two like your eggs?"

"Poach—" Mustang started, but got cut off by an elbow from Hawkeye.

"Please don't trouble yourself, Winry," Hawkeye said, shooting a glare at Mustang. "I'm sure we can get some breakfast at a local restaurant."

"Oh, it's no trouble!" Winry said, beaming at them. "Eggs are easy enough that it doesn't matter if I take the time to make them a bunch of different ways!"

"Her favorite is eggs in a basket," Roy said with a cough, and Hawkeye shot him another glare. Ed raised an eyebrow. Apparently, those two were having breakfast together in this world. Interesting.

"Don't worry about it!" Winry said, waving at Hawkeye even as she opened her mouth to protest. "I'm sure you three are going to be talking for a while, so who knows when you would be able to get out to a restaurant anyway. You might as well still have decent food in the meantime!"

Hawkeye let out a long sigh before giving Winry a soft smile. "If you insist. Thank you, Winry."

"I'll make your favorite, too," Winry said, flashing Ed a smile before she went off to the kitchen. He watched her as she walked off, staring at her stomach and trying to figure out if he could see a bump. After all, there had been something that had tipped his double off to her being pregnant. Maybe it was just that he knew her too well for his own good, because Ed couldn't see much of anything. Then again, he hadn't seen Winry in years, so he could be remembering her proportions wrong.

Ed was interrupted out of his thoughts by a cough from Mustang, and he turned to look while rolling his eyes.

"Yeah, yeah, I haven't forgotten about you, jackass," he said with a sigh, going over to sit in the chair Winry had been sitting in, across from the two guests. "What do you want to know?"

"Where did you want to start?" Mustang said, raising an eyebrow at Ed. Damn, he did that a lot. Apparently, Mustang still had the same pretentious fancy boy air no matter what world he came from. 

"We could spend all day getting around to actually talking at this rate," Ed muttered, pinching the bridge of his nose. He then sighed and looked up. "Okay. Fine. It's never going to sound less weird, so. I'm from a parallel world."

Silence blanketed the room for a minute as the three of them stared at one another. Ed almost felt like holding his breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Of course Mustang wasn't going to believe him, not when Al hadn't even believed him. Any minute now he would find some way to brush Ed off, dismiss it as part of his heart attack, something. 

"It's too early for this," Mustang finally muttered, reaching up to pinch the bridge of his nose. He then turned and called in the direction of the kitchen, "Can I get coffee with those eggs? Extra on the... wake-up part?" 

Winry shouted back an affirmative from the kitchen. Ed frowned, flicking his attention between the two like a tennis match. It was weird seeing Mustang on such familiar terms with Winry, but then again, maybe in this world he hadn't... 

"So what's the plan?" Mustang said, leaning forward on his knees and interrupting Ed out of his thoughts. Ed blinked and looked over to Mustang. 

"Th-The plan?" 

"You're the child genius, the kid who's always got some new innovative way to deal with these crazy problems," Mustang said with a snort. Hawkeye did a silent nod beside him. "Don't tell me you don't already have ideas on how you're going to deal with this."

"No, I don't—" Ed sighed and shook his head, looking at Mustang in disbelief. "Wait, so that's it? You just believe me? You don't need me to prove it or something? Or... More details?"

"Eventually I would like more details, yes," Mustang said with a sigh. "But I'm a solider first and foremost. I'm more interested in knowing what needs to be done rather than philosophizing over how we got here."

Ed blinked. "So you don't... You don't think I'm pulling your leg or something? You just... Trust me?"

Mustang actually laughed at that, a sharp bark that crinkled his eyes. "You honestly think I wouldn't be able to tell when you were pulling my leg?"

"Well... I-I..." Ed stammered, blinking at Mustang. How was everyone in this world just so accepting, anyway? Ed was more used to feeling like it was him and Al against the world—hell, it _had_ been him and Al against the world when they had suddenly been on the run—but now it was almost like everything had turned upside down instead. Al was the one person who didn't believe him, and everyone else was on board. Ed didn't know what to make of that. 

"So, the plan," Mustang reiterated, spreading a hand out as if he were almost making a deal. "Don't tell me you haven't had some sort of brilliant insight in the past day." 

"No, I don't—" Ed started, almost scoffing, but then froze, slowly shaking one finger as the idea hit him. He stood up and started pacing in the space in front of the sofa. "Wait. _Wait._ Maybe I do have a plan." 

"There's our little mastermind," Mustang said, almost sounding proud. Ed held up a finger to silence him, his other hand rubbing at his bottom lip. 

"Shush. No height bullshit when I'm trying to think."

When it boiled down to it, really, this was the same problem he had dealt with before. He was a world away from where he was supposed to be. Which meant if they could just open the Gate, then they could switch back. Bigfoot had mentioned that he had given up his Gate, however that worked, which meant he wasn't able to do alchemy. But that was fine, they would be able to work around that. They had Al on the other side able to do alchemy, and they had him on this side. He even had a way to communicate between the two worlds and actually coordinate their efforts. The only thing they were missing was a toll. 

But his double had already come up with the perfect, _impossible_ solution. 

"I'm going to need to find out more about how the Gate works in this world," Ed muttered with a frown. "I wonder if Teacher..."

He was cut off by Mustang clearing his throat, and Ed turned to look with a surprised expression. "I've got bad-good news for you, Fullmetal." 

"Like what?" Ed swallowed a lump in his throat. He didn't want to hear about Izumi dying in another world. A long minute passed between them before Hawkeye cleared her throat. 

"Please just tell him, sir." 

Mustang coughed, swallowed, and then made direct eye contact with Ed. "Ask me your questions. I've seen the Gate."

"Oh." Ed suddenly felt like all the air had been knocked out of him, and he flopped back down in the chair. " _Fuck_." 

"Yeah." 

"How... How did that happen?" 

"It's a long story." 

"Isn't it always when the Gate's involved?" Ed closed his eyes and took in a deep breath. "From what _I_ know of the Gate, it can act like an... inter-dimensional doorway of sorts. Which means that if I could get it open, then me and the other me might be able to switch places. The only problem is that would definitely require some sort of payment. The other me mentioned something about how he was able to... give up his Gate?" 

"You _talked_ to him?" 

The words were practically whispered, and when Ed turned to look, Winry was standing in the archway of the living room. She had four plates balanced precariously in her hands and was staring at him with wide eyes. Ed felt his breathing catch, and he almost regretted saying it. Of course that would matter to her. He should have been rushing down to tell her first thing and instead, he was focusing on plans and tolls. 

"Y-Yeah," he murmured, looking down at his hands. "He, uh... He really misses you." 

"How is that possible?" Mustang said, frowning as he grabbed the plate Winry held out to him. 

"Uh..." Ed glanced back up at Winry, who was handing the other plate to Hawkeye. "I guess apparently we synchronize when we're sleeping and we sort of just... meet in the middle." 

"So," Winry turned and handed him a plate of soft scrambled eggs as she spoke. Of course she knew exactly how he liked his eggs without asking. Of course he and his double liked the same eggs. "So would you be able to... Get a message to him?" 

"I'm pretty sure he already knows," Ed murmured, looking at her belly and then at the plate with a fresh omelet sitting on it. "You know, Winry, you don't have to choke your way through the same breakfast as us if it's just going to make you sick." 

Winry coughed on the bite of omelet she had just put in her mouth, spluttering and looking over at Ed with wide eyes. He gave her a weak smirk in response, just a small acknowledgment that yes, he knew exactly what that meant. She took in a shaky breath and put her fork down with a soft clink. 

"I... I should go check on Teddy and Zaza," she said, setting her plate on a side table and quietly leaving the room. Ed didn't miss the fact that even though Mustang and Hawkeye were both quietly eating, their eyes were sharp and clearly not missing the invisible tension. Ed sighed and pushed at the scrambled eggs on his plate. It wasn't quite the same without the fried potatoes he had gotten used to adding in an attempt to stretch out their food. But it wasn't like Winry would know things like that were different about him. She had no reason to know those things. She only knew the person he would have been, the person who never learned to speak German, never spent long nights over rocket blueprints with sauerkraut, potatoes and maybe a little beer if he and Alfons got frustrated enough. Ed's heart clenched at the memories.

How was it he could spend so long in Germany longing for Amestris, and yet when he was in Amestris, he was longing for Germany? Was he just doomed to be homesick forever, no matter what he did?

"Is everything alright between you two?" Mustang said, quietly taking a bite of his eggs. Ed shook himself out of his thoughts and turned his attention back to the current world he was dealing with. He could miss Germany later, in the middle of the night, when no one needed him.

"It's... complicated," Ed said with a sigh. "There's not exactly a handbook on the best course of action to take when you wake up in an alternate world where you happen to be married to your best friend." 

Mustang's eyebrows looked like they were about to get lost in his hairline, but he was clearly resisting the urge to say something. Not like Ed was going to push him into talking, though, not over subject matter like that. In the end, it was Hawkeye who ended up breaking the silence. 

"So you're not married to Winry in your world?"

"Nope," Ed grunted, shoveling a large enough bite of eggs into his mouth that it would hopefully excuse him from talking for a minute or two. 

"So who _are_ you married to?" Mustang said, and Ed shot him a glare. 

"I'm _not_ , hypocrite. Something wrong with that?"

"No, no, of course not," Hawkeye jumped in, holding up her hands. Ed glanced between her and Mustang. So they were also apparently talking as a unit in this world. _Interesting._ They had always been good at reading each other's minds, of course, but this was... Different, somehow. They had clearly been through something different than the Hawkeye and Mustang he had known. He hadn't even _seen_ Hawkeye during his brief jaunt home. 

"It's just weird," Mustang added, slightly waving his fork. "You've turned into my new Hughes. Every time we talk, it's like pulling teeth to hear about anything other than your kids and wife and kids and wife and kids and wife. Imagine if you went to another world and Hughes didn't have a kid." 

Mustang paused and frowned. "Wait, Hughes _does_ have a kid in your world, right?" 

"Yeah, yeah, of course he has a kid," Ed said with a snort. "He— Well. Actually. I guess it depends on which Hughes we're talking about." 

"You... know more than one Hughes." 

"Long story," Ed said parroting Mustang's words from earlier with a smirk. 

"I don't know whether the thought of him not shoving baby pictures in my face is exciting or terrifying," Mustang said, turning back to his eggs with an amused shake of his head.

"Terrifying," Ed muttered. "Trust me." 

_"They called her dirty and they_ spat _on her, Hughes," Ed said, lunging forward and grabbing the elbow of the older man's coat. "_ Please _. You have to tell your friends_ something. _"_

_"They're allowed to express their opinions, Ed," Hughes said with an irritated shrug of his arm that separated him from Ed._

Ed shuddered at the memory of that terrifying night from several years ago. He mentally reminded himself that he was fine, that he shouldn't let himself get worked up over things that were only memories anyway. If he wanted to make sure Noah would stay safe, then he needed to focus on getting back home as quickly as possible. Which meant focusing on Mustang and whatever information he had. 

"You okay, kid? You look pale."

Ed snapped out of his thoughts to shoot Mustang a glare. "I'm hardly a kid now, ya know." 

"Right." Mustang smirked slightly and shook his head. "It's hard to remember sometimes." 

"Yeah, because you're getting old," Ed scoffed and rolled his eyes. He paused and then considered Mustang. "You know, I think I can count on one hand the amount of times I've seen you in civvies. What's up with that?" 

Mustang grunted and shrugged, setting his empty plate aside on the side table. "You're not enlisted anymore, so this isn't really what you would call an official visit. This is just... A friend checking up on a friend after a serious health scare." 

Ed frowned. A non-official visit meant that Mustang must have used some of his precious personal time, which Ed knew he was absolutely loathe to give up without decent cause. "You would go to that much trouble for me? You could have just called me from your house, dummy." 

"This saves time in the long run," Mustang said with a half-smirk. "I know that if _you_ sound scared, then whatever's going on is serious. I'm sure I would have had to come out here eventually."

Ed just stared at Mustang for a minute, blinking. It was coated in a jab because _how else would they ever talk to each other_ , but he could still see the meaning hidden underneath that. Mustang trusted _his_ judgment. Mustang trusted him. Even if this wasn't exactly "his" Mustang, the sentiment still hit Ed harder than he cared to admit. Mustang had been willing to make a dash across the country just because he trusted Ed. 

"So," Mustang said, lacing his fingers together. "What do you need to know for this probably-crazy plan of yours?"

A grin slowly stretched over Ed's face, and he leaned forward, his forearms on his knees. 

"Tell me everything you know about the Gate." 

* * *

"How," Noah breathed, looking Ed over like she couldn't even believe he was in front of her, " _How_ are you suddenly able to speak German?" 

"Well, it's not easy," Ed said with a shake of his head, slowly pushing himself to his feet and brushing himself off. "It's like running a constant transmutation. Only... It's like I'm transmuting the two parts of myself together."

"Doesn't that hurt?" Noah said. She sounded almost horrified, so Ed tried to give her a reassuring smile. But even with the excitement of a tantalizing new discovery, he could still feel the heart-wrenching sadness underneath, so he had a feeling the smile wasn't as reassuring as it could possibly be. 

"No, of course it doesn't hurt. It just feels like... Remembering how to do something you haven't done in a really long time." Ed then sighed and glanced around the room. It felt like he had been stuck inside the small apartment for forever now, and it was like the walls were beginning to press in on him. He needed to go somewhere, run, do something, not just stay inside for another day. 

"I need to get out of here for a while," he said, turning and looking at Noah. She frowned at him.

"No, no, you..."

"Please, Noah," he said, and his voice shook with the words. "I'm in an entirely different world and I've hardly seen anything other than this apartment. I feel like I'm losing my mind. Didn't Al mention something about you and... the other me going out to earn money usually?" 

"No," she murmured with a frown. "No, this is safer."

"I can handle talking to people now," Ed said, and he cringed at the fact that he sounded a little like a petulant child. "You've been understanding me. And I could use more practice. Come on, don't you need that extra money?" 

"Well..." Noah frowned and glanced over to the corner where a guitar was propped. "But Ed wouldn't want..." 

"Noah," Ed murmured, and she spun back to look at him. "Look at me. I'm an Ed too. I know what sorts of things we want. And yes, of course he wouldn't want you or Al to be in any danger. But he also wouldn't want you putting your lives on hold just because he wasn't around." 

Noah sighed and bit her lip, turning back to look at the guitar for a minute before she turned back to Ed. "Okay. I'll make you a deal, then. Prove you can handle it and play a song on the guitar." 

"How do you know I don't already know how to play guitar?" Ed smirked and raised an eyebrow. Noah's face fell like she couldn't believe she hadn't thought of such a possibility, so Ed added with a small laugh, "I mean, I never actually had time to learn guitar, though. I just figured you should see the potential flaw in your plan."

"I guess all Eds are smart asses," Noah muttered with a roll of her eyes as Ed went over to the guitar and picked it up. 

"Okay," Ed said, awkwardly placing his fingers over the strings. "Uh, here goes, I guess."

He closed his eyes and let out a slow breath as he tried to focus. Something about the guitar was actually oddly familiar to him, like it was warm and alive in his hands. He trailed his fingers across the strings, trying to let go of himself and just let the music take over instead. When he finally stopped and looked up again, Noah had tears in her eyes. 

"Why... Why did you play that song?" she whispered. Ed shrugged and looked down at the guitar. 

"I dunno. I just kind of... let my fingers play the song they knew best." 

"Of course," Noah murmured, and then she made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a sob. Ed put the guitar back down with a frown and went back over to Noah even as she sunk on the sofa. But before he could even say anything, she was burying her face in her hands and making a sound like she was trying to fight the tears that were coming out anyway. "Of course that's the song he knew best." 

"Noah..." Ed whispered. His hand instinctively went out to touch her, but then he paused, unsure and hovering slightly over her shoulder. Was touching even something that actually comforted her, or was it just something that scared her even more? He wasn't used to just touching someone coming with so much extra weight. "Um... I'm willing to give you a hug. If you, uh, _want—_ " 

He was cut off by Noah suddenly thumping her head against his chest. (Ed didn't want to acknowledge how much she had to bend down in order to actually accomplish it, though.) But before he had much chance to say something reassuring to her or even pat her back, her memories were pressing against his mind like a second skin. 

He was looking at some dirt path as it zoomed past, getting jostled by every single bump in the road. There were feminine voices singing a song, and he could vaguely recognize it was the song he had been picking out on the guitar just a few moments ago. And then he was turning and looking at—wait, was that honestly what he looked like from the back? Ed had never even thought to question that he had never seen himself from behind before. Noah's thoughts pressed at him even as his own mind spun though, wondering if she'd said too much, wondering if the handsome blond man was mad at her, scared of her. And then she turned, her eyes flicking a little further away from the other him, landing on the concerned look Al was giving her. His blue eyes were sharp, clearly thinking a mile a minute as he looked her over. 

Wait, blue? Ed could have sworn that this Al's eyes were—

But then the memory spun and swirled, and he was in some apartment other than the one they were currently in. Noah was moving—no, dancing—in the memory, and the room spun and twirled with her. Ed was only able to catch glimpses of the other him plucking at a guitar and laughing. 

"Wait, hang on," the other him said, his fingers tripping over the strings and making a distorted sound. He laughed and shook his head at the guitar, and Ed—no, Noah—giggled with him. The other him frowned in concentration, plucking awkwardly at the strings before slowly nodding, the tune stabilizing again. "No, no, I got it now." 

The memory was changing again, to a dark night where Ed and Noah were stretched out on the grass and looking up at a dark sky full of stars. But before the memory could fully solidify, it was suddenly disappearing entirely, being replaced by the other apartment, the one Ed was actually used to seeing. And there was Noah sitting next to him, and he was himself, like he was supposed to be. He shook his head, trying to take in a slow breath. 

"Ed?"

"Yeah, sorry," he said, closing his eyes and holding a hand to his forehead. "It's just... getting memories from you is kinda disorienting, that's all." 

"Oh, you—" Noah paused, her words catching as she sucked in a breath. "You saw one of my memories?"

"Yeah, I think it must have been when you and..." Ed trailed off with a frown as he opened his eyes and looked at Noah again. "You and the... other Ed met."

"Oh." Noah looked down at her hands in her lap, a small smile turning up the corners of her mouth. "Well, I _was_ thinking about that. I just... haven't been able to do that since..."

"Yeah," Ed murmured, looking down at his own hands. "I'm guessing that there must be an impact when you get more emotional."

Specifically, she seemed more capable of making him see her memories when she was missing his double particularly hard, but Ed didn't really want to say that specifically. So instead, a long moment of silence passed over the two of them, neither really sure what to say to the other. It was still odd to Ed how she could feel so familiar and distant to him all at once. Noah somehow felt like she was an old friend, and he knew it wasn't just because of the familiar face like with Al, since he had never been particularly close to Rosé back home. Somehow, Noah still felt like he had known her for years, and yet somehow he also felt distant and disconnected from her, like an old friend he maybe hadn't been keeping up with for years and now he was trying to make awkward small talk with her at some cousin's wedding or something. 

He glanced at Noah out of the corner of his eye. And somehow, his double was in love with her. Of course Sylvan had been trying to deny it when Ed had asked, but Ed recognized that embarrassed spluttering. He had once done the exact same kind of denial over a cup of coffee in Hawkeye's apartment. She had been able to recognize what he wasn't willing to say, just like he could recognize with his double now. 

But there was one thing Ed was sure about. If Noah had managed to get his double falling for her, then she had to be a pretty awesome person. And a big part of Ed was curious about who else he could have apparently fallen for besides Winry. 

He was interrupted out his thoughts by a sudden clatter from the table. When he and Noah both turned to look, they were greeted by none other than MuhMuh on the table, leaning down to bite at a screw. Ed jumped to his feet with a yelp. 

"Hey! I thought you were supposed to avoid that if it was on the table!" he snapped. MuhMuh ignored him with the kind of willful obstinance that only a cat was capable of, biting at the screw and tossing it back in his mouth like it was some sort of treat. Ed yelped and lunged for the cat, managing to grab him before he ran off. At least Ed was familiar enough with toddlers that he was able to stick his fingers in MuhMuh's mouth and pull the screw out before he actually swallowed it. 

_"Kistokai!"_ Ed snapped, waving the screw at MuhMuh. The cat gave him a glare that was somewhere between being bored and annoyed that Ed had stopped his fun. _"Kisto, kisto, kistokai!"_

_"Kistokai?"_

Noah was standing up and coming over to Ed, and he suddenly realized that in his panic, he had slipped out of German and back to Amestrian. He sighed. That was definitely something that was going to take a bit of practice. He wondered if it would ever start feeling more natural, or if using this shortcut instead of actually learning the language would just make it so he never really felt perfectly comfortable with the language. Ed sighed and took a deep breath in, trying to recenter himself and connect to the same feeling from before. 

"Sorry, I slipped into Amestrian for a minute there." 

"I figured," Noah said with a laugh. "I was wondering what it meant." 

"Oh, uh..." Ed laughed a little and threw the screw back on the table with the other automail parts. "It's pretty rude actually, but it's just a way of saying someone is... uh... A troublemaker, I guess? _Kai_ is a person, but it's... a rude way of saying it, and then _kisto_ is a modifier that means... trouble? It's like calling someone a delinquent, but... more like a swear." 

"Ah, sounds like an important word for your vocabulary," Noah said with a laugh. "I bet the Amestrian dictionary has a picture of you next to the word." 

"Hey!" Ed said with a laugh. "I got called _kistokai_ enough from Mustang, I don't need it from you too!"

Noah hummed at him, the corners of her mouth turning up in amusement. "Well, if at some point you decide you're done whining and you're willing to put that automail somewhere the cat can't get it, then I could always show you around town like you wanted."

"Really?" 

"Just don't go kistokai-ing all over town and making me regret it," Noah said, her eyes glinting. Ed made a face at her. 

"For the record, that's _not_ how you use the word." 

"Oh please, as if you're one to give me a lecture on following rules."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I finally slipped a bit of Amestrian in there. Yeah, this was an actual conlang my spouse and I were working on building at one point. We ended up mostly dropping it, but there's still all these little bits and scraps of language that I've got saved for times like this. So now you can all swear in a language that doesn't exist, lol. 
> 
> Sorry for being a week late with this update. I got hit with a really nasty cold last week and I just couldn't bring myself to look at a screen long enough to edit this. I'm still not feeling perfect, but at least I was able to get through this. For future reference, you can always check out [my tumblr](https://edisacornball.tumblr.com/) if I happen to be late one week, since I'll be more likely to post my excuses there, haha.


End file.
